Introduction

Mining areas in the global South have often been characterised as ‘enclaves’ in which mineral extraction is spatially and politically separated from the country in which it takes place.Footnote ¹ The Copperbelt has often been understood as such an enclave, an island of urban industrial development in an otherwise remote rural interior, linked to the global economy by new communication channels – historically railways and, more recently, advanced telecommunications – that collapsed physical distance and enabled mine companies to avoid the obligations otherwise imposed upon commercial operations by the states and communities in which they operate. Certainly, twenty-first-century Copperbelt mine companies have sought to and been somewhat successful in off-shoring their profits and anonymising their in-country operations as a way of reducing local accountability.Footnote ² In contrast, the long-term operations of mid-to-late-twentieth-century Copperbelt mine companies involved a determined making and control of urban space. There is nonetheless often a ‘taken for granted’ acceptance that its companies were not only able to create new urban communities but also to impose their desired meaning on these spaces. This is, this chapter will show, belied by a history in which Copperbelt residents challenged company boundaries and invested these areas with meanings of their own.

The spatial turn, inspired by Lefebvre and disseminated across the humanities and social sciences in the 1990s and early 2000s, focussed attention on how space was created, determined and contested by social actors, as well as how it is defined and invested with meaning.Footnote ³ Historians as a result better appreciate the centrality of space and place in historical change, while in African studies it helpfully challenged the hegemony of the colonial or nation-state and showed how sovereignty over space is mediated and contested – and the study of border regions such as the Copperbelt provides a particularly revealing example of this.Footnote ⁴ Colonial efforts to maintain racial segregation and the ‘migrant’ status of urban workers were, for example, undermined by the latter’s mobility and political agency. Likewise, historians of company towns elsewhere in the world have emphasised the ways in which company control of space was central to their power.Footnote ⁵ The promotion of the modern urban lifestyle of mine townships required the continual policing of the boundaries between urban areas and of the nuclear families they were ostensibly designed for, a struggle for spatial and social control that continued into the independence era.

Copperbelt towns were, as we have seen, given meaning by a set of elite actors who attached to them their notions of urban modernity in order to differentiate them from their understanding of ‘rural’ Africa. In focussing on the arrangement of space in Mufulira and Likasi, this chapter will explore how segregated residential areas inhabited by African mineworkers and the wider African urban population were created, how their borders and communities were policed and how they were invested with meanings that changed over time. While racial and occupational hierarchies helped determine their initial segregation, the chapter focusses on the divisions between African areas and the ways in which their residents engaged with the division between the ordered and well-managed mine township and the mixed and chaotic municipal areas that, particularly after independence, were their poor cousins. The political anomaly of enclaved mine townships in decolonising African states was itself the subject of political attention the chapter explores the abortive efforts to integrate Zambia’s mine townships into Copperbelt towns in the early 1960s and the ongoing attempts by Zambia’s rulers to bring these areas under their control. In Haut-Katanga, in contrast, UMHK/Gécamines’ continued separate management of its ‘camps’, while central to its continued paternalistic control of its workforce and their families, ultimately helped secure domination of these areas by the Zairian state.

While Copperbelt mineworkers were initially housed in huts not dissimilar to those in rural villages, the construction in the 1940s and 1950s of brick-built housing estates laid out on grid systems was key to their orderly management and the projection of Copperbelt towns as places of modernity and Westernisation. Epstein notes Luanshya’s careful segregation of mine areas, in which comfortable bungalows for Europeans were laid out on one side of the mine and African residences on the other side. The European area of the municipality actually bordered the European area of the mine, while the African municipal area was a mile apart from the African mine township. While the urban landscape emphasised the division between these areas, they were, Epstein rightly argues, symbiotic, linked by European control over African lives and labour, and the services provided by municipal African residents to mineworkers.Footnote ⁶

Epstein also drew attention to Luanshya’s system of workplace, housing and community services, overseen and controlled by the mine company. The regime of UMHK mine camps has been especially characterised as a holistic, disciplinary panopticon, a system of coercive or disciplinary paternalism.Footnote ⁷ While Copperbelt mine companies certainly tried to carefully control and discipline the working and private lives of employees and their families, this intention was undermined by the actions of workers and their families, who constantly engaged with the wider town, both formal and informal, and with residents of the peri-urban and rural areas beyond the mine complex. From the start, mine camp residents compared their lot with their neighbours: Higginson records the comparisons drawn by striking UMHK workers and their wives in 1941 between their conditions and nearby ‘squatter’ areas where women were free to farm. They demanded that the controls imposed by the company on their agricultural activities needed to be compensated for.Footnote ⁸

Notwithstanding Africa’s centuries-long history of cosmopolitan urbanity, most southern African colonial towns were built from scratch in places whose official meaning was defined by their European planners.Footnote ⁹ As the Special Commissioner for the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt put it in 1959, ‘[t]o build towns on this scale was necessary in order to get copper produced in a remote and primitive part of Africa’.Footnote ¹⁰ Mine towns attracted migrants who provided vital labour but who were initially classified as the rural subjects of their chiefs. While UMHK’s mining camps provided their residents with housing and services, they were simultaneously denied free movement within the growing Katangese urban milieu. In Northern Rhodesia, segregationist notions continued to deny rights to new urban settlers. Companies and colonial officials conceptualised mine towns as inherently Western spaces in which African residence was justified only by employment and certified by the carrying of a situpa or pass. While Ferguson rightly highlights how early migrants, and particularly women, evaded state and company controls and settled in town without official status, such evasion came at a price. Undocumented migrants had poorer access to services – housing, education, waged work – that constituted significant rights to the Copperbelt city.Footnote ¹¹ There were certainly many thousands of Copperbelt residents who made a life for themselves in town outside company and state controls, a number that rose as residency rules fell away with independence. Nonetheless, one’s place in the town remained closely tied to employment, status and family life.

While the ethnic mixing – tshanga tshanga – of mine township populations invokes a sense of community and solidarity, Copperbelt towns in general and mine townships in particular were profoundly hierarchical places, in which workplace divisions were constantly reinforced by unequal access to housing and social opportunities.Footnote ¹² Powdermaker highlighted that, ‘[i]nstead of an egalitarian standard of living, the kind of house and the amount of pay determined the worker’s place in the hierarchy’.Footnote ¹³ The racial and occupational segregation of Copperbelt residents was certainly imposed by a colonial capitalist order, and sometimes resisted by those residents. But the notion that urban residence demanded certain standards of ‘civilisation’ and specific norms of behaviour, implicitly or explicitly associated with European modernity, continued to dominate the ideas that officials and many residents had about them. The relationship between workplace seniority, housing quality and differential social provision meant that, in Zambia in particular, social class mapped directly onto residential area. This chapter uses interview material to demonstrate the ways in which residents acted out and internalised their new class positions through their social behaviour in ways that were every bit as divisive as those between Africans and Europeans. There was, then, always a diversity of ways to belong in the Copperbelt city. Upwardly mobile residents sought to combine employment and educational opportunities, for themselves and especially for their children. Many of our interviewees achieved success by climbing the pyramid of ‘advancement’ but just as many experienced setbacks and hardship, outcomes that influenced the extent to which they today view town life as a meritocracy or as a place of inequality and injustice where one’s fate was decided by race, ethnicity or other ‘grounds for difference’.Footnote ¹⁴

Garth Myers reveals how the mapping of cities such as Lusaka rendered invisible the ‘peripheral’ or ‘peri-urban’ areas where most of its people lived.Footnote ¹⁵ Myers’ work forms part of a flourishing literature on African cities that has sought to understand the continent’s specific urban development while rejecting the association of its urban ‘slums’ with ‘primordial’ disorder. Filip de Boeck and AbdouMaliq Simone show how cities in the global South deemed chaotic or uninhabitable represent alternative forms of urban living that are not best understood through a idealisation of Western urbanisation that is itself a poor reflection of the historical experience of, for example, London, Los Angeles or Sydney.Footnote ¹⁶ The dual nature of the ‘right to the city’ lies, then, both in challenging structural inequalities and in reimagining the city in wholly different ways.Footnote ¹⁷ Consistent with the absence of informal settlements on maps, Copperbelt research focussed for many decades almost exclusively on the mine townships and, to a lesser extent, on its municipal areas. The RLI’s scholars recognised in the late 1950s that informal residents of Lusaka provided important services for the city’s official areas, but nonetheless saw ‘squatter’ areas as places of disorder and moral and political threat.Footnote ¹⁸ Researchers affiliated to CEPSI worked, as we will see, with the colonial authorities to create new peri-urban communities that would alleviate the threat they saw as arising from urban unemployment and resultant disorder. There was little appreciation that Copperbelt towns always depended on services provided by charcoal burners and night soil men, denied residence in mine towns but central to their existence.

Ultimately, Copperbelt towns proved unable to meet the aspirations for modern urban living of most of those who sought it out. While some senior workers bought into the middle-class lifestyle that came with success, others rejected the controls and conformity of the mine township. The high price of participation in the urban dream led some to relocate to new informal areas that grew up in Copperbelt towns after independence. While recent anthropological work has focussed on Copperbelt communities’ creative use of post-modern space, we lack detailed histories of the informal settlements where many thousands of Copperbelt residents lived, something to which this chapter makes a modest compensatory contribution.Footnote ¹⁹ Through the experience of Kawama, on the outskirts of Mufulira, the chapter demonstrates how, when the state failed to provide formal housing, Copperbelt residents created new farming and trading communities that could access urban services while avoiding their costs. This demonstrates that informality is not a manifestation of the region’s recent decline but has always been the invisible underside to its formal existence. The evidence suggests that, while the policing of boundaries between the different areas of Copperbelt towns was central to elite knowledge about their function and to the identity of many residents, flows and linkages between these areas – richer and poorer, formal and informal – were key to their historical reality.

Counting and Housing the Copperbelt African, 1945–1964

From 1940, Katangese mining towns were demarcated into separate residential areas for mine and non-mine African workers.Footnote ²⁰ Improved worker housing was central to the efforts of UMHK and its allies in the Catholic church to promote social hierarchy, stability and ordered family life and to challenge the threat of religious and political ‘extremism’. The UMHK, like the railway company BCK (Chemin de fer du bas Congo au Katanga), substantially improved the infrastructure of its ‘camps’, a term suggestive of their authoritarian nature, overseen by chefs de camps and fenced off from the wider town. Centres Extra-Coutumiers (CECs) were the state-controlled residential areas in which the wider African population resided. Post–World War Two development policies (see Chapter 2) spurred improved housing provision in both areas. The colonial authorities decreed a fixed minimum habitable space per person, which was steadily increased from 4.93 m² in 1953 to 7.17 m² in 1960.Footnote ²¹ Camps that once housed single male migrants were, by the early 1950s, mainly home to growing families. Healthcare provided by UMHK ensured that natal mortality in its camps fell from 30.24 per cent in 1947 to 24.15 per cent in 1957, and then continued to fall.Footnote ²²

While its stabilisation programme solved UMHK’s labour supply problem, it created a new demographic one. The company provided larger houses to workers with more children, creating a tacit incentive for larger families. Jadotville’s (Likasi) population in 1954 was 58,406, of whom 21,358 were men, 19,324 women and 31,276 children. The town’s population was split roughly 50–50 between mine and non-mine areas but roughly 60 per cent of all children lived in UMHK’s camps.Footnote ²³ The company’s annual reports, while typically lauding its achievements in family housing and social provision, expressed growing concern about the resultant costs. In 1952, when UMHK camps housed 59,610 people, 18,217 were men, 14,526 women and 26,867 children or 45 per cent of the total.Footnote ²⁴ By 1957, the total population was 92,547: 21,857 men, 18,956 women and 51,734 children, 55 per cent of the total.Footnote ²⁵ The resultant pressure on company housing was such that UMHK began facilitating the relocation of some workers to CEC areas, where they could buy plots and build their own houses.Footnote ²⁶ By Congolese Independence, two-thirds of mine camp residents were children.Footnote ²⁷

Housing provision by UMHK, allocated ‘according to the size of the family and almost never according to the status of the worker’, was praised by foreign observers such as J. D. Rheinallt Jones, ‘native affairs’ adviser to the Northern Rhodesian government, who conducted research on the welfare of African workers in Katanga, Southern and Northern Rhodesia in April–May 1951. Stating that it was ‘far in advance’ of provision elsewhere, he noted, among its qualities, that UMHK houses had openable glass windows whereas those south of the border simply had holes for ventilation.Footnote ²⁸ Northern Rhodesian mine townships, while superior to urban housing elsewhere in the colony, were of significantly poorer quality. The belated official acceptance of family stabilisation in the late 1940s meant that thousands of single mineworkers resided in hostels until after independence and married couples lived with their children in cramped two-room houses. The post–World War Two boom, coupled with the general failure of rural development and accelerated migration to town (Chapter 2), generated an official anxiety that contrasts sharply with the confident interventionism of the Katangese authorities. A 1954 Northern Rhodesia government report is typical:

This growing population would, officials feared, be incapable of making the necessary ‘transition’ to urban societal norms: ‘Most people still regard their real home as being elsewhere and have not yet taken root. Half the population lives upon employment in the copper mining industry. A marked characteristic is the protracted hospitality which Africans extend to any tribal or clan relative who comes in from the country’.Footnote ³⁰

It was difficult even to measure this ever-expanding and unstable society. The official population of Northern Rhodesia’s five urban Copperbelt districts rose from 200,100 in 1951 to 236,000 in 1953, but these figures confused work and residential status: Mufulira’s mine employed 9,725 men but it is not clear what the other 1,318 ‘other’ male adult residents did for a living. Reports identified 6,981 women ‘employees’ (i.e. registered residents of mine township houses) and 1,142 ‘other’ women; and 34,200 children of employees and 5,295 ‘other’ children – many of these figures were in any case ‘estimates’.Footnote ³¹

In both Haut-Katanga and Northern Rhodesia, municipalities had grown up around mine areas: these were officially separate from mine operations and housing but were commonly dependent on the mine for provision of piped water and electricity.Footnote ³² In the mid-1950s there was considerable investment in non-mine housing: in Mufulira’s main African municipal area, Kamuchanga, 750 new houses were built in 1958–9 and the oldest housing, essentially huts, was demolished.Footnote ³³ New house building, however, slowed considerably in the five years before independence, as a growing gap emerged between expectations of urban development and the limited funds available for housing projects.Footnote ³⁴ Employers were legally obliged to provide housing for their workers but, lacking the resources to do so, many built slum-like temporary residences. The population of Northern Rhodesia’s municipal Copperbelt areas was estimated in 1960 at 11,924 men, 6,790 women and 16,081 children, a total of 34,795.Footnote ³⁵ Yet these figures did not include ‘about 11,000 men, women and children lodgers, visitors and floating population in the municipal areas’.Footnote ³⁶ In Kitwe it was estimated in 1954 that 25 per cent of its council area residents were living there illegally.Footnote ³⁷

Across the Copperbelt, it was then necessary to police the borders not only of mine and non-mine areas but equally of workers’ families. The 1958 Rules and Regulations for Northern Rhodesian mine employees gave eleven instances in which a worker could be instantly dismissed, most of which related to residential rather than workplace behaviour. These included fighting in an African township, brewing beer or having beer in your possession without authority and housing a non-mine employee in a mine house.Footnote ³⁸ Warnings were constantly issued that urban social provision was reserved for those with a legitimate reason to be in town, assumed to be a male worker and his immediate family. In October 1958, an awareness campaign in Northern Rhodesia’s rural areas explained that only children whose parents were in employment would obtain Copperbelt school places.Footnote ³⁹ The Copperbelt African Education Department issued explicit instructions:

The willingness of African urbanites to police their family boundaries was itself considered a measure of their break from ‘traditional’ values:

Action was periodically taken against those illegally occupying houses. In Chingola, four raids were carried out by the Location Superintendent in July 1959, with 253 ‘loafers’ detained, 188 charged and 55 homes made available.Footnote ⁴² The model of a productive population of nuclear families had consequences for unmarried women. In Luanshya, the resultant dilemma was captured in a 1958 report:

In practice, then, many Copperbelt migrants had no right to be in town. Many interviewees initially lived with extended family members while they sought work or education. William Chinda arrived in Mufulira to stay with his mineworker uncle in Kankoyo. Although not an immediate family member, he benefited from foodstuffs supplied by the mine company; his uncle paid for his schooling while he searched for work.Footnote ⁴⁴ George Mwenda likewise stayed with his brother in Kankoyo Section 7 on arrival in 1957.Footnote ⁴⁵ Cyprien Ramazani came to stay with his aunt in Katanga in 1956: she lived with her husband in the BCK railway compound and Ramazani was able to obtain a job with the rail company after attending free company-provided schooling.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly, Edouard Nkulu arrived in Elisabethville in 1961 and stayed in the house of his brother, a UMHK employee, while he attended school.Footnote ⁴⁷ While mine companies insisted on the nuclear family model for housing their workers, evading its strictures was in practice central to the strategies of many migrants who came to work for them.

The true scale of Northern Rhodesia’s unofficial urbanisation was only revealed in 1963, with the first census of Copperbelt towns: Kitwe’s African population, estimated in 1962 as 98,781, was found to be 109,116. The District Officer explained:

There was, unsurprisingly, a growing housing shortage ‘that is never likely to be met’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Kitwe city council controlled 8,881 residential properties and had a waiting list of 3,036 families: ‘The social evils to which this state of affairs gives rise needs no emphasis, and the provision of housing by itself is no solution to the problem [which] is not a municipal one but a national one’.Footnote ⁵⁰

At the other end of the social scale, attempts were made to develop specialist housing for ‘advanced’ Africans. In 1959 Mufulira’s municipal council agreed that ‘better class’ homes for ‘middle class Africans’ needed to be located separately from its main African housing area.Footnote ⁵¹ Such efforts were, however, undermined by racialised conditionalities that demanded the ‘right kind’ of African middle-class household:

Mine companies worried about the dislocating effects on ‘advanced’ Africans of relocation to hitherto whites-only areas:

It was thought that modernisation training might be needed for newly promoted African families:

As this suggests, mine companies invested heavily in socialising their workforce into the ‘right’ way to live in town. The UMHK’s Mwana Shaba newspaper, started in 1957, published articles advising mineworkers and their families on how to manage their wages, socialise in ‘civilised’ ways while drinking in moderation and keeping their homes in a ‘respectable’ manner. Company-funded cultural groups provided theatrical and musical lessons on how to avoid marital conflict (Chapter 7). Women were advised and trained by company-employed social workers on how to be modern housewives and mothers, manage a household budget and keep a clean and respectable family home (Chapter 5). Children learned via company-sponsored sports and leisure activities how to accept rules and to play well in teams, and generally to avoid the temptations of idleness.Footnote ⁵⁵

Induction in town life was, as suggested, also provided by the extended urban community. Older relatives, uncles and brothers, helped their younger kin navigate the town and make a good life there. While there was significant disagreement about what that good life might involve (see below), there was a consensus that it was ‘new’ and could be instructively counterposed to that of the village. Guidance on urban marriage was provided by church elders, while ethnically based associations helped people manage the distinct burdens of an urban death. Diverse processes of socialisation were then at the heart of town life. While the late colonial Copperbelt saw efforts by mine companies and states to fix mobile Africans into designated spaces and rigid identities, many African urbanites engaged with and partly bought into the construction of this urban respectable identity, while also making it their own, something that is helpfully historicised by former senior railway official Emile Ngoy Muyondwe:

For some at least, African urban residency required a performance of modern living by African elites that would continue well after political independence.

Maps and Meanings of the Late Colonial Mine Town

Here it is useful to map the formal areas of the towns of Mufulira and Likasi (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). On both sides of the border, Copperbelt towns were divided into mine-controlled areas containing shafts and winding gear, overground plant and processing areas and mine townships or camps. The latter were then divided into areas for unskilled and skilled workers, as well as smaller areas for senior workers and managers, originally segregated by race. In Mufulira, Kankoyo, adjacent to the mine plant, housed most low-skilled African workers, while the older Kantanshi township housed the growing number of African skilled workers. Fairview, the area reserved for Europeans, was gradually opened up to the few senior Africans. In Likasi, Panda was the main African mine camp, Shituru housed workers employed in the UCS chemical factory that became part of Gécamines in the early 1970s and there was also a BCK (later SNCC/SNCZ) company camp that housed the town’s railway workers and their families.Footnote ⁵⁷ Mufulira’s main council-controlled area was initially known as ‘the Location’ and later as Kamuchanga. Chibolya was built by Costain to house construction workers and became home to many poorer salaried workers.Footnote ⁵⁸ In Likasi, the non-mine area was known as Kikula, a CEC cité where, like Kenya in Lubumbashi, many of those not directly employed by a large company resided.

Figure 3.1

Map of Likasi, Zaire, 1980 (detail from). US Defense Mapping Agency.

Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

Figure 3.2

Map of Mufulira, 1961. Rhodesia and Nyasaland Federal Department of Trigonometrical and Topographical Surveys.

Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0.

These areas acquired distinct identities reflecting their ownership and control, but also the supposed character of their inhabitants. Powdermaker’s description of her Luanshya research ‘setting’ captures the characteristics of mine township and municipality that is echoed in our interviews:

Interviewees, while recalling that all urban areas used to be cleaner and better managed than today, emphasise the especially ordered nature of mine areas.Footnote ⁶⁰ Virtually all interviewees recalled mine townships/camps as places where the company managed public space, maintained housing and ensured residents’ health by regular inspections of neighbourhoods and house interiors.Footnote ⁶¹ Characteristically, former UMHK/Gécamines residents express gratitude for such intrusive care. Some, such as David Kalabo Mupanga, born in company clinics and later pupils at its free primary schools, still characterise themselves as ‘enfants Gécamines’.Footnote ⁶² Former ZCCM workers, while praising the good housing and services of the past, recall these in more neutral terms, seeing them not only as the result of company generosity but also union demands (see Chapter 4).Footnote ⁶³

Life in Panda was, under the watchful company eye, a highly regimented existence.Footnote ⁶⁴ Until independence, a curfew ensured that residents were within the camp by 9 pm.Footnote ⁶⁵ It was forbidden to operate a private drinking place and making noise in the evening was prohibited to ensure workers were fresh for their morning shift.Footnote ⁶⁶ Non-mine areas were more relaxed: residents, unconstrained by the company monopoly over housing and leisure services, were freer to socialise on their own terms. Jacques Kibombo recalls that, ‘[i]n the evening … everyone was in his plot … In Likasi to have fun you had to go to the city centre … People were disciplined in Panda, they did not take too much alcohol’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Séraphin Musoka also remembers visiting Kikula to drink beer: ‘There is a difference between the [mine] camp and the city. At camp, you feel constrained; in the city, it’s open; we are having fun’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Mufulira, the council area was considered by Kankoyo residents as a place where ‘rough people’ lived, where mineworkers could drink and easily attract women with their monthly wages.Footnote ⁶⁹ Chibolya was a particularly neglected or ‘dark’ location where, William Chinda recalls, ‘[t]here were a lot of thugs, fighting, molesting people’.Footnote ⁷⁰ There was, then, a symbiotic relationship, economic and social, between these ostensibly bounded spaces. Interviewees recognised that mineworkers’ salaries provided a monthly windfall for the myriad small businesses and places of entertainment they frequented in non-mine areas.Footnote ⁷¹ Those who were not employed by the company, even those who chafed at its paternalist controls, recognised that their fortunes and those of the whole town were tied to it.

The timeless contrasts drawn by interviewees between these areas tend to dehistoricise their evolution, reflecting changing notions of what was considered ‘modern’ as well as demands for improved housing and urban services by residents and activists (see also Chapter 4). A 1961 inquiry by the Northern Rhodesia ‘urban African services committee’ into township amenities concluded, for example, that pit latrines were now unsatisfactory and that ‘there was justification for providing street lighting and tarred roads at least in parts of African Housing Areas’. Despite such improvements, municipal residents still seemed to be in perpetual transition to fully fledged urbanity:

In these unsettled circumstances, a close watch was kept on ‘unauthorised compounds’, preventing these consolidating themselves into permanent squatter camps. In Mufulira, scattered peri-urban residents were deliberately concentrated in Kansuswa, an area on the town’s outskirts (and outside the mapped area shown in Figure 3.2) that was encouraged towards formal existence and regulation in the late 1950s.Footnote ⁷³ Initially regarded by officials as an uncontrolled place of drinking and wild living, it came to be recognised as a legitimate part of town:

Decolonisation, Separation and Integration

In the run-up to and following independence, African nationalists challenged the enclaving of mine company operations. This occurred economically via nationalisation (Chapter 6) but also spatially: why should mine townships be separated from the towns of the Copperbelt, with housing and social services controlled by companies rather than by elected authorities? In Haut-Katanga, demands for integration were relatively limited: mine camp residents participated in the elections of March 1960 and it proved impossible to isolate them from that year’s political revolutions (see Chapter 4). Secessionist conflict did not spare mine areas: the violence directed at ethnic Kasaians drove 71,266 people out of Katanga in May–October 1962; UMHK lost nearly 8 per cent of its workforce.Footnote ⁷⁵ While UMHK mine camps never recovered their former depoliticised form, they continued to be distinct legal and economic entities, under both the secessionist state and the subsequent Mobutu regime. Johannes Fabian’s ethnographic research in 1966–7 on the Jamaa Christian movement focussed on Musonoi, one of Kolwezi’s mine camps. Fabian observed the authoritarian nature of Musonoi, its totalising system of control and welfare and, citing Moutoulle from 1946, its essentially unchanged ‘colonial’ nature in which the mine company system ‘consists of all normal means for making the black worker like his work and stay attached to it as long as possible’.Footnote ⁷⁶ He highlighted the intrusive powers of the Chef de Camp, noting that any large festive occasion required his permission and for which a guest list had to be provided in advance. Fabian conceded, however, that living standards were higher than in rural areas, particularly with the significant decline in village health and education services following independence. Some mineworkers appreciated its regime:

In Northern Rhodesia, plans were developed to integrate mine townships into unified systems of municipal administration. In 1960 it was proposed that ownership and control of mine housing, as well as roads, medical, social and welfare services, would be transferred to relevant municipalities, leaving only the mine and production-oriented workplaces under company control.Footnote ⁷⁸ Detailed negotiations took place between government officials, keen to integrate mine communities into the nation-in-the-making, and companies, keen to divest themselves of townships that would, in the context of union demands and political pressure for elected representation of their populations, prove an increasing cost burden. In February 1962 the mine companies explained that their objectives in ‘getting out of the housing business’ (except European and senior African housing) were fourfold:

1. I to reduce pressure on the companies for better housing, particularly on the African side;

2. II to reduce possible future political interference by concentrating our activities on mining;

3. III to put more responsibility back on to employees;

4. IV to put the housing emoluments directly into pay packets.Footnote ⁷⁹

Although the change would involve an estimated £3.1m rise in annual costs arising from increased salaries to cover full household rents, companies would avoid the future outlay of capital on housing and other services.Footnote ⁸⁰ Though AAC was concerned about future pressure on companies to pay higher rates to municipalities, the security implications of losing control of the townships and the ‘likelihood’ of their decline into ‘slum conditions’, it was felt that the benefits would outweigh the risks.Footnote ⁸¹ Opposition among African workers was anticipated but not expected to prove insurmountable and companies pursued rapid integration in the opportune moment of decolonisation. The companies would then be protected from demands by workers ‘for better living standards which already have probably got a little out of hand … The demands would in the future come on to house owners, e.g. municipalities … and these bodies are expected more effectively to be able to withstand such demands than the companies’.Footnote ⁸²

In June 1964, as agreement with government seemed close, a substantial increase in rent designed to reflect actual housing costs was delayed because ‘it will be important for the Companies not to be associated with the increases’.Footnote ⁸³ The companies agreed:

Presenting township integration in talks with government as a progressive step consistent with decolonisation enabled the companies to disguise their motives for divestment:

By independence in October 1964, the government and companies had agreed the main principles for incorporation.Footnote ⁸⁶ Draft legislation was drawn up in early 1965, interim arrangements put in place for the companies to support the municipalities in managing their increased responsibilities, and April 1965 agreed as a potential handover date.Footnote ⁸⁷ This date came and went, but in May 1965 Minister of Local Government Sikota Wina publicly restated, without explaining the delay, that integration remained the government’s aim.Footnote ⁸⁸ The post-independence government, perhaps realising the political sensitivity and economic burden that managing the mine townships would bring, belatedly insisted that ‘incorporation’ should require the retention by the companies of the high density housing stock where most mineworkers and their families lived.Footnote ⁸⁹ Meanwhile, the mineworkers’ union expressed concern that housing standards would decline following incorporation and insisted that the companies continue to provide all services.Footnote ⁹⁰ Integration did not take place and the mine townships continued to be owned and run as separate entities until the late 1990s, but this episode reveals that this was by no means inevitable. In Haut-Katanga, however, UMHK/Gécamines’ commitment to the company township model endured; following the secession, and notwithstanding the tense relationship between the company and the Mobutu government (see Chapter 6), its centrality to the Congolese/Zairian economy meant that it continued to operate in relative political isolation. Contrary, however, to Fabian’s assumptions that this would keep the camps, now officially referred to as cités, in a (post)colonial limbo, the company’s authoritarian paternalism ultimately proved entirely compatible with the patriotic neo-paternalism of the Mobutu era.

Keeping Up Appearances: Social Mobility and Hierarchy in the Postcolonial Mine Towns

Political independence did not, then, transform the Copperbelt’s spatial order: while the virtual collapse of influx control made it easier for rural migrants to settle in town, the many other divisions – between mine and non-mine areas and between unskilled and ‘advanced’ workers – continued to be central to the lived experience of residents. Certainly, interference by company officials in the households of Gécamines families did not lessen with independence and nationalisation. Jérôme Mulunda was a Chef de Cité in Panda during the 1970s, overseeing both workplace and township:

Many Likasi interviewees praised the company’s intervention in their daily lives:

Continual attempts were made to control the presence of unauthorised residents, practices framed by the imperatives of security and order. In 1972, for example, the company

In Mufulira, likewise, interviewees praised company township management in the 1970s and 1980s in characteristically modernist terms. Jennifer Mulenga, who first stayed in Mufulira as a child in the 1960s and returned as a teacher in the 1980s, recalled: ‘The place was more developed and the levels of civilisation improved. … the mine company was strict with cleanliness’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Patson Katwisi fondly recalls monthly house-cleaning competitions:

For some residents, however, such controls encouraged a passive mentality:

The ultimate aim of many urbanites was acquiring a home of one’s own in town. But housing status remained, until the 1990s, closely tied to and dependent on employment: in Zambia in particular, workers could only move to larger houses in more desirable areas when they were promoted. Emelia Banda, whose husband worked for the Olympic milling company in Mufulira, first lived in Chibolya in a single-room house with no electricity and a single communal tap for water. She was, however, able to move after independence to a bigger house in Kamuchanga with two bedrooms, a sitting room and a kitchen with its own water supply.Footnote ⁹⁷ For Mufulira’s mineworkers, the move from Kankoyo, where the majority of unskilled workers lived, to Kantanshi, which after independence was home to the growing population of skilled African workers, was a visible sign of progress, giving some access to the better social amenities of the low-density areas originally created for whites.Footnote ⁹⁸ Zambian mineworkers were granted larger houses when they married – single men moved from old hostels and shared accommodation to small family houses with three or four rooms – but family size was less significant than in Haut-Katanga, where it remained the key determinate of house size.Footnote ⁹⁹

While modest pensions were paid to retiring mineworkers, they were still obliged to surrender their company houses on retirement. While some senior employees could afford to buy land and build their own properties, most retirees instead shifted to other areas of town, often informal settlements and peri-urban areas. Pensions were far from sufficient to live on – retirees eked out a precarious existence, depending on a combination of casual labour, farming and remittances from children. While conditions were difficult, very few interviewees seriously considered ‘returning’ to their village of origin. In Haut-Katanga many had now been in town for three generations and had few if any links to their place of origin. In Zambia, where some more recent migrants were still linked to rural areas by kinship migration and remittance payments, village retirement was, as Ferguson revealed, often a fraught process involving conflict with relatives and a struggle to come to terms with the hardships of rural life.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As the gap grew between village and town life, many urban residents, like those Fabian met in Musonoi, sought to avoid the demands made upon them by kin. Evans Nsabashi, for example, moved from Kitwe to Mufulira precisely to lessen that load: ‘I had stayed in Kitwe for a long time and hence did not want to stay close to my relatives. … Relatives would trouble me in terms of buying them things and keeping them as well. I needed some time to establish myself’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The most senior Zambian mineworkers, now resident in formerly whites-only areas such as Fairview, often adopted their ‘middle-class’ lifestyle. Patson Katwisi took up tennis on company-run courts and socialised with colleagues of a similar rank at the golf club.Footnote ¹⁰² It was vital for those promoted to senior positions to socially distance themselves from ordinary workers: Kathbert Nchema, who moved from Kantanshi to Fairview in the early 1970s following his promotion to Shift Boss (one of the first Africans to hold this senior position), recalls that promotion depended on the company’s assessment of you in and out of work:

Likewise, former UNIP councillor Chrispin Chani recalls: ‘As [a] member of [Mufulira] Blackpool [football] club I and my family members went to watch football matches free of charge and [were] sitting in VIP sections. The Country club was a drinking place for respectable members in society. Belonging to these clubs also widened your political base’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Senior staff in Zambian mines were entitled to loans to buy cars and houses, paid back from salary deductions.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ They could not, however, be members of trade unions and were discouraged by ZCCM from involvement in politics.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Jacques Mangenda, who as a Gécamines chemist trained in the late 1960s to become a ‘cadre’, a managerial-level employee, was accordingly housed in an area still occupied mainly by whites: Africans living there, he explained, needed to show that they could behave in a civilised manner (‘ils devaient montrer la civilisation’).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Emile Ngoy Muyondwe argues that a ‘respectable’ worker could not socialise in Kikula because of the unruly behaviour of drinkers there.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Ilunga wa Kumanza recalls envy directed against senior Gécamines officials: ‘Jealousy existed, at Gécamines itself. Some junior workers there were jealous of me. Workers of other companies envied us. … The unemployed also envied and were jealous of Gécamines workers’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

While social life in Haut-Katanga’s post-independence mine townships was divided on a class basis, a degree of social integration was enabled by ‘cultural associations’, in a context in which ethnicity was tacitly central to political representation.Footnote ¹¹⁰ While residential ethnic mixing continued to be company policy during his time as Panda Chef de Cité, Jérôme Kipili Mulunda saw no contradiction between this policy and his presidency of Ceproma (Cercle pour la Promotion de Marungu). In this group, he explains,

René Mwamba Kasongo and François Musenge Dikumbi were similarly active in Lwanzo Lwa Mikuba, an ethnic association for Sanga and Sanga-related communities.Footnote ¹¹² Albert Mutangala Tshibembe has long been involved in Sempya, an equivalent Bemba-speaking association:

Although such cultural associations did exist in the Zambian Copperbelt, their role was limited to activities such as organising ‘tribal’ dancing (see Chapter 7) and did not generally provide such pathways to employment opportunities.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Beyond the Boundaries: Informality and Independence

While many residents embraced the security of the mine township, others were stifled by it. Indeed, over time more Gécamines workers chose to relocate to Kikula, which offered greater potential to build and then expand one’s own house and take advantage of its greater, if more precarious, opportunities.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Euphrasie Yowa’s husband left Gécamines, frustrated at not being promoted while those he trained were sent to Europe for further opportunities. He set up a carpentry business and opened a bar. Although the family lost the Gécamines ration as a result, Yowa preferred life in Kikula, where her husband earned more and could give her money every day.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Pami wa Kasongo grew up in Likasi’s railway camp and worked for Gécamines in the 1980s, but preferred to build his own house. He, like many interviewees, associates the mine areas less with social amenities and more with social control.Footnote ¹¹⁷

With the post-independence collapse of influx control and the failures of rural development, the growing Copperbelt population could not be housed in existing municipal areas and high private rents proved prohibitive for most people. Kansuswa, on the outskirts of Mufulira, provided an increasingly attractive base for poorer residents and retirees from where they could commute to work in town while also farming.Footnote ¹¹⁸ For Ana Chilufya, whose husband was a low-waged barman, town life was more difficult than the village because everything had to be paid for: in 1970 they found a two-bed house in Kansuswa with outside bathroom and toilet from where she supplemented her husband’s salary by farming and trading.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As a young electrician in the 1950s, Washeni Mweni was housed in the Chibolya area by his foreign employers. Later, working as a garbage collector, he couldn’t pay the rent on his council accommodation and moved out to Kansuswa where he and his wife could also farm.Footnote ¹²⁰ Many of those who made a living by trading food or selling services recognised their indirect dependency on mining wages, since it was mainly mineworkers and their families who bought their goods and services.Footnote ¹²¹

Other new urbanites established squatter camps on the edges of existing urban areas. In 1965, the Zambian authorities recognised the challenge:

By the early 1970s, Zambian councils were no longer able to build new housing: the Second National Development Plan restricted state housing aid to ‘site-and-service’ projects and councils were reluctant to initiate these when central government funding remained uncertain.Footnote ¹²³ Copperbelt councils continued to lobby for the integration of mine townships; a further attempt to implement this led to a major conflict between the labour movement and the government in 1980–1, as mineworkers resisted the likely decline in township services (see Chapter 8).Footnote ¹²⁴ As state funds for housing dried up, local UNIP leaders sponsored the (illegal) construction of informal compounds. Such projects provided new ‘constituencies’ for party officials like William Chinda: once a few informal houses were built by prospective residents, they would then lobby to legalise these properties and provide them with water and electricity.Footnote ¹²⁵ When senior Mufulira council clerk Joshua Mwape sought to have such houses demolished, he was overruled by the mayor and other officials, who saw such residents as potential political supporters, so compounds grew up without either plans or infrastructure.Footnote ¹²⁶ Kawama, previously a forestry zone on the outskirts of the town, was officially recognised as a squatter area by Mufulira council in the early 1970s, which it aimed to develop and integrate via the provision of infrastructure and services.Footnote ¹²⁷ The resources to do this were however both limited and diminishing and controlling Kawama’s growth proved impossible. In October 1972 councillor S. M. Kapumpa reported that ‘unless the siting of houses at [Kawama] was controlled, it would be difficult for the Council to carry out improvements such as roads and water’. It was agreed that the town engineer arrange for demarcation of plots as soon as possible ‘to control [the] development of Kawama’.Footnote ¹²⁸

In lieu of consistent official intervention, Kawama was developed mainly by its residents. Dewys Mulenga’s grandfather had worked in Mufulira mine and lived in Kantanshi, but his death in a workplace accident in 1975 left seventeen-year-old Dewys without financial support. He was initially employed as a house servant but wanted to work for himself. When he married in 1979 he turned first to licensed charcoal burning in the Mutumbi forest and then to farming, on a plot rented from the forestry department.Footnote ¹²⁹ That year, he acquired a plot in nearby Kawama and built a house there. Although Mulenga recalls that the plot was allocated by the ‘government’, in practice the area’s housing was ‘organised’ by the local UNIP branch chairman, who pressured residents to build quickly or lose the opportunity. Mufulira Council tried to have these self-built houses demolished in the early 1980s but resistance by their residents was endorsed by the Catholic church, which legally acquired land in Kawama on which it built a church. Electricity was also organised by the church in 1983 and Kawama steadily grew, its population attracted by the absence of house rents and tax payments and their ability to combine agricultural activities with access to Mufulira’s schools and urban services. Foster Kunda, who had lived in Kamuchanga while her carpenter husband worked for the council, moved to Kawama in 1975. She favoured building her own house over renting, but had first to clear bush before helping establish the area’s market, where she sold vegetables and other goods she bought in town. Her children walked four to five kilometres to the nearest school in Kamuchanga. ‘Farming in town’ was, however, discouraged by authorities that sought unsuccessfully, like their colonial predecessors, to maintain a clear division between rural and urban life:

In the 1990s Dewys Mulenga, now ward chairman, oversaw the establishment of agricultural cooperatives in Kawama. The council gradually took over services such as water supply, but it was only in 2016 that most Kawama residents acquired title deeds to their properties. While life in Kawama is ‘free’ compared with much of Mufulira, Mulenga and Kunda both recognise the continued importance of the mine, whose employees are the largest single group of customers for the produce grown there. In this respect they, and the tens of thousands of other informal Copperbelt residents, have always been as central to the region’s history as the quintessential urbanites of the municipality and the mine township.

Conclusion

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the increasing financial crisis affecting the mining industry would make itself felt in all areas of the urban Copperbelt. Council revenues from unprofitable mining collapsed and the mines’ ability to provide electricity and water supplies was undermined. Mine companies increasingly struggled to maintain the preferential services delivered to their residents and to police the fragile boundaries between their townships and adjacent squatter areas, with which – as Chapter 8 will show – they were (and had always been) co-dependent.

While the segregation of Copperbelt towns was initiated by colonial states and mine companies, first on racial and then on social or economic lines, many of these divisions were enthusiastically maintained by both elite actors and many Copperbelt residents before and after political independence. The strong correlation between workplace seniority, family respectability and residential status made Copperbelt communities acutely aware of these linked hierarchies and the ways they were associated with influential political and moral ideas about the right way to live in town. In their own lives, however, many individuals implicitly or explicitly challenged these boundaries and hierarchies, moving between mine and non-mine areas for leisure and employment opportunities, and over the course of their lives. While some successful residents adopted ‘modern’ lifestyles and attitudes stereotypically associated with Western consumption, others – often but not only for financial reasons – relocated from the safe but stifling mine townships to reside in municipal areas or even the growing informal settlements in order to lead more precarious but, from their perspective, less constrained lives.