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Abstract
Following Zambia’s independence in 1964, several thousand non-Zambian Africans were identified and progressively removed from the Copperbelt mines as part of a state-driven policy of ‘Zambianisation’. Curiously, this process has been overlooked among the multitude of detailed studies on the mining industry and Zambianisation, which is usually regarded as being about the removal of the industrial colour bar on the mines. This article challenges that perspective by examining the position and fate of non-Zambian African mineworkers, beginning with patterns of labour recruitment established in the colonial period and through the situation following independence to the protracted economic decline in the 1980s. In it I make two arguments. First, Zambian nationalism and the creation of Zambian citizenship were accompanied on the Copperbelt by the identification and exclusion of non-Zambians, in contrast to a strand in the literature which stresses that exclusionary nationalism and xenophobia are relatively recent developments. Second, one of the central and consistent aims of Zambianisation was the removal of ‘alien’ Africans from the mining industry and their replacement with Zambian nationals. This was a key objective of the Zambian government, supported by the mineworkers’ union.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Hyden Munene, Sishuwa Sishuwa, Hangala Siachiwena, Rebecca Swartz and Zahra Shah for their assistance, as well the audience at the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town where I presented an earlier version of this article. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice.
Notes
1 Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (hereafter ZCCM), 3.2.3B, Aliens engaged from 1 January 1964.
2 The major mine outside the Copperbelt, the Broken Hill/Kabwe Mine, is not included in this article as its workforce was mostly recruited from the region around the mine, which became Zambia’s Central Province. Why labour recruitment patterns at this mine were so different to the rest of the mining industry is a subject best addressed in a separate article.
3 For an analogous case, see R. Aminzade, Race, Nation and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Africa: The Case of Tanzania (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 114–18.
4 S. Dorman, D. Hammett and P. Nugent (eds), Making Nations, Creating Strangers: States and Citizenship in Africa (Leiden, Brill, 2007), p. 4.
5 L. Fourchard and A. Segatti, ‘Introduction of Xenophobia and Citizenship: The Everyday Politics of Exclusion and Inclusion in Africa’, Africa, 85, 1 (2015), pp. 2–12.
6 Other scholars, however, have stressed that these tensions are not entirely modern: S. Dorman, ‘Citizenship in Africa: The Politics of Belonging’, in E.F. Isin and P. Nyers (eds), Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (London, Routledge, 2013), p. 161; and L.B. Landau, ‘Loving the Alien? Citizenship, Law and the Future in South Africa’s Demonic Society’, African Affairs, 109, 435 (2010), p. 219.
7 M. Neocosmos, From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’: Explaining Xenophobia in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Citizenship and Nationalism, Identity and Politics (Dakar, CODESRIA, 2010), pp. xi, 114.
8 N. Kersting, ‘New Nationalism and Xenophobia in Africa – A New Inclination?’ Africa Spectrum, 44, 1 (2009), p. 10.
9 D. Kohnert, ‘New Nationalism and Development in Africa’, Africa Spectrum, 44, 1 (2009), p. 112.
10 Fourchard and Segatti, ‘Introduction of Xenophobia and Citizenship’, p. 4. The authors also point out that other scholars emphasise continuity from the post-independence period to the 2000s.
11 P. Geschiere and F. Nyamnjoh, ‘Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging’, Public Culture, 12, 2 (2000), p. 423.
12 P. Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 17, 171–2.
13 S. Dorman, ‘Citizenship in Africa’, p. 165. Former president Kenneth Kaunda was barred from standing in the 1996 presidential election and, briefly, stripped of his Zambian citizenship because his parents were born in Malawi, and his successor, Frederick Chiluba, had his citizenship challenged in the courts on the grounds that he had been born in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
14 B.E. Whitaker, ‘Playing the Immigration Card: The Politics of Exclusion in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana’, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 53, 3 (2015), p. 274. See also Kersting, ‘New Nationalism and Xenophobia in Africa’, p. 16; and O. Kobo, ‘“We Are Citizens Too”: The Politics of Citizenship in Independent Ghana’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 48, 1 (2010), pp. 67–94.
15 Dorman, Hammett and Nugent (eds), Making Nations, pp. 4, 8.
16 D. Donham, Violence in a Time of Liberation: Murder and Ethnicity at a South African Gold Mine, 1994 (Durham, Duke University Press, 2011), p. 5.
17 J. Muzondidya, ‘Jambanja: Ideological Ambiguities in the Politics of Land and Resource Ownership in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 33, 2 (2007), p. 340.
18 M. Larmer, ‘Permanent Precarity: Capital and Labour in the Central African Copperbelt’, Labor History, 58, 2 (2017), pp. 170–1.
19 See L. Butler, Copper Empire: Mining and the Colonial State in Northern Rhodesia, c.1930–64 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 137–44, 224–38, for an account of the negotiations and disputes around ‘African advancement’.
20 M. Burawoy, The Colour of Class on the Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianisation (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 27; C. Perrings, ‘A Moment in the “Proletarianization” of the New Middle Class: Race, Value and the Division of Labour in the Copperbelt, 1946–1966’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 6, 2 (1980), p. 188; G. Mhone, The Political Economy of a Dual Labor Market in Africa: The Copper industry and Dependency in Zambia, 1929–1969 (Rutherford, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 156.
21 James Ferguson defined Zambianisation as ‘the long-established policy of independent Zambia to seek the gradual replacement of white expatriate management with qualified black Zambians’, J. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999), p. 12.
22 M. Burawoy, ‘The Colour of Class Revisited: Four Decades of Postcolonialism in Zambia’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, 5 (2014), p. 964.
23 C. Perrings, ‘Premiss and Inference in Labour Studies: A Zambian Example’, African Affairs, 81, 322 (1982), p. 91. Burawoy made a similar argument in ‘Colour of Class Revisited’, p. 967.
24 Burawoy, Colour of Class, p. 72.
25 P. Daniel, Africanisation, Nationalisation and Inequality: Mining Labour and the Copperbelt in Zambian Development (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 105.
26 M. Larmer, ‘At the Crossroads: Mining and Political Change on the Katangese-Zambian Copperbelt’, Oxford Handbooks Online (2016), available at https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935369.013.20, retrieved 1 March 2019.
27 J. Parpart, Labor and Capital on the African Copperbelt (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1983), p. 162. See also E.L. Berger, Labour, Race, and Colonial Rule: The Copperbelt from 1924 to Independence (London, Oxford University Press, 1974); C. Perrings, Black Mineworkers in Central Africa: Industrial Strategies and the Evolution of an African Proletariat in the Copperbelt, 1911–41 (London, Heinemann Educational, 1979) and H. Meebelo, African Proletarians and Colonial Capitalism: The Origins, Growth and Struggles of the Zambian Labour Movement to 1964 (Lusaka, Kenneth Kaunda Foundation, 1986).
28 M. Gluckman, ‘Tribalism in Modern British Central Africa’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 1, 1 (1960), pp. 62–3.
29 For more on spatial dimensions of workers’ claim-making and an example from a later period of workers in Zambia asserting regional claims, see D. Miller, ‘New Regional Imaginaries in Post-Apartheid Southern Africa – Retail Workers at a Shopping Mall in Zambia’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 31, 1 (2005), pp. 117–45.
30 R. Negi, ‘The Mining Boom, Capital and Chiefs in the “New Copperbelt”’, in A. Fraser and M. Larmer (eds), Zambia, Mining and Neoliberalism: Boom and Bust on the Globalized Copperbelt (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 221–7.
31 G. Nzongola-Ntalaja, ‘The Politics of Citizenship in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, in Dorman, Hammett and Nugent (eds), Making Nations, p. 76.
32 T. Sunseri, ‘Working in the Global Slaughterhouse: Tanganyika Packers from Late Colonialism to Nationalization, 1947–75’, Seventh Annual Conference, International Research Centre Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History, Berlin, 30 June–1 July 2016, p. 236.
33 J. Muzondidya, ‘From Buoyancy to Crisis, 1980–1997’, in B. Raftopoulos and A.S. Mlambo (eds), Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008 (Harare, Weaver Press, 2009), p. 187.
34 B. Siegel, ‘The “Wild” and “Lazy” Lamba: Ethnic Stereotypes on the Central African Copperbelt’, in L. Vail (ed.) The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London, James Currey, 1989), p. 355.
35 M. Musambachime, ‘Escape from Tyranny: Flights Across the Rhodesia–Congo Boundary, 1900–1930’, Transafrican Journal of History, 18 (1989), p. 151.
36 J. McCracken, A History of Malawi, 1855–1966 (Woodbridge, James Currey, 2012), p. 182.
37 ZCCM 16.2.7F, District Superintendent, Livingstone to Station Master, Luanshya, 22 January 1930.
38 ZCCM 16.2.7F, C.F. Spearpoint to General Manager, Roan Antelope, 16 September 1936.
39 C.F. Spearpoint, ‘The African Native and the Rhodesian Copper Mines’, Journal of the Royal African Society, 36, 144 (1937), p. 50.
40 The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA), CO 795/43/5, H.S. Munroe to Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, 30 January 1931.
41 TNA CO 852/257/6, Notes of a Meeting Held in Mr Boyd’s Room, 14 September 1939.
42 Daniel, Africanisation, p. 64.
43 A. Daimon, ‘“Ringleaders and Troublemakers”: Malawian (Nyasa) Migrants and Transnational Labour Movements in Southern Africa, c.1910–1960’, Labor History, 58, 5 (2017), pp. 662–3.
44 ZCCM 16.2.7F, Annual Report on Native Affairs, 1936.
45 ZCCM 16.2.7F, C.F. Spearpoint to Acting General Manager, Roan Antelope 22 December 1934.
46 National Archives of Zambia (hereafter ZNA), SEC1/1318, Origin of Labour Employed in the Mines and Works of Northern Rhodesia, October 1948.
47 ZCCM 10.4.9E, Roan Antelope Copper Mines, Statistical Survey of African Labour, December 1959.
48 Aminzade, Race, Nation, and Citizenship; J. Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2012).
49 S.H. Phiri, ‘National Integration, Rural Development and Frontier Communities: The Case of the Chewa and the Ngoni Astride Zambian Boundaries with Malawi and Mozambique’, in A.I. Asiwaju (ed.), Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations Across Africa’s International Boundaries, 1884–1984 (Lagos, University of Lagos Press, 1985), pp. 121–3.
50 S. Cunningham, ‘Nationalization and the Zambian Copper Mining Industry’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1985), p. 71.
51 Daniel, Africanisation, p. 107.
52 This is an estimate as the figures on the number of African workers taken from Daniel, Africanisation p. 105 come from January 1964 while the figures for white workers represent an average from across 1963, taken from the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Mining Industry 1966 (Lusaka, Government Printer, 1966), p. 160.
53 Daniel, Africanisation, pp. 105, 133.
54 ZNA, Shelf 10, Box 45, Monthly Digest of Statistics, February 1972.
55 Central Statistical Office, Census of Population and Housing Volume I – Total Zambia (Lusaka, Central Statistical Office, 1973), p. 8.
56 M. Larmer, Mineworkers in Zambia: Labour and Political Change in Post-Colonial Africa (London, Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), pp. 72–5.
57 Commission of Inquiry into the Mining Industry 1966, pp. 45, 73.
58 ZNA MLSS1/18/3, Ministry of Labour Press Release, 19 November 1966.
59 Ibid., Proceedings of the Committee on Zambianisation, 20 January 1967.
60 M. Larmer, ‘Unrealistic Expectations? Zambia’s Mineworkers from Independence to the One-Party State, 1964–72’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 18, 4 (2005), p. 329.
61 ZNA MLSS1/18/3, Memorandum, Mines Local Staff Association – Chibuluma, February 1967.
62 Ibid., record of meeting, 14 March 1967.
63 ZCCM 14.1.3A, Report of a Special Sub-Committee Appointed to Consider Conditions of Service, 15 October 1963.
64 ZCCM 3.2.3B, RST – Luanshya Division, Foreign Local Section & Shift Bosses.
65 Ibid., Letter from Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs to Copper Industry Service Bureau, 30 May 1967.
66 A.J. Peaslee, Constitutions of Nations Vol. 1, Africa (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), p. 1051.
67 J. Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 234, 239.
68 ZCCM 3.2.3B, RST – Luanshya Division, Foreign Local Section & Shift Bosses.
69 Ibid., D.A. Etheredge, Anglo American to C. Halliday, RST, 13 May 1967.
70 Ibid., List of Nurses of Rhodesian Origin, 13 September 1966.
71 ZCCM 14.1.3A, Ministry of Labour, Circular Minute, 18 August 1967.
72 ZCCM 3.2.3B, CISBEE, Kitwe to Graywacke, Mufulira, 21 December 1967.
73 Ibid., Roan Antelope, Luanshya to CISBEE, Kitwe, 21 December 1967.
74 ZNA CO10/01/4, Minutes of the Committee on Zambianisation in the Mining Industry, 20 September 1967.
75 Ibid., Minutes of the Committee on Zambianisation in the Mining Industry, 29 August 1967.
76 ZCCM 3.2.3B, Quarterly Summary of Alien Local Labour Employed.
77 Ibid., Declaration of Renunciation of Citizenship of Malawi, Frank Mkwanazi, 21 November 1966.
78 Figures at a provincial level are not available. Figures are only given for males here as almost all mineworkers were male at this time. Central Statistical Office, Census of Population and Housing Volume I – Total Zambia (Lusaka, Central Statistical Office, 1973), pp. 18, 23.
79 ZCCM 3.2.3B, Assistant Personnel Manager to Sectional Personnel Heads, Roan Antelope, 16 October 1968.
80 The Progress of Zambianisation in the Mining Industry, December 1968 (Lusaka, Ministry of Labour, 1969), p. 9.
81 Daniel, Africanisation, p. 107.
82 ZCCM T8.2A, Rokana Senior Staff Employment Returns for April 1973.
83 ZCCM 1.3.4J, Number and Percentage of Alien African Employees as at 28 February 1978.
84 Figures for 1967 and 1969 calculated from ZCCM 3.2.3B, Quarterly Summary of Alien Local Labour Employed. Figures for 1972–78 calculated from ZCCM T8.2A, Rhokana Corporation, Monthly Employment Returns. Employment returns for 1974 and 1977 were missing from the file.
85 Daniel, Africanisation, pp. 25–6.
86 ‘Kalengwa Mine to be Closed’, Times of Zambia, Ndola, 29 November 1977.
87 ZCCM 1.3.4J, Chibuluma Division, Kalengwa Mine, December 1977.
88 Ibid., Telex from Copper Industry Service Bureau, Kitwe to RCM, Lusaka, 31 March 1978.
89 ZCCM 1.3.4J, Chibuluma Division, Redundant Labour – Geological Services Departments, December 1977.
90 ZCCM 11.7.9C, Merger Benefits Plans, Annex 5.
91 ‘Alien Miners Must Go’, Times of Zambia, 2 October 1982.
92 ZCCM 1.4.1F, Nationalities of Expatriates in ZCCM Divisions, 1983.
93 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, p. 6.
94 M. Larmer, ‘Historical Perspectives on Zambia’s Mining Booms and Busts’, in Fraser and Larmer, Zambia, Mining, and Neoliberalism, p. 41.
95 ZCCM 5.2.2H, General Manager, Mufulira Division to ZCCM Human Resources, Lusaka, 23 July 1992.
96 Ibid., Alien Terminations from 1 January 1987 to 31 May 1992. Terminations included 566 from Malawi and 284 from Tanzania.
97 Total employment was higher than this as several thousand people were also employed by ZCCM in non-mining subsidiary companies. ZCCM 5.5.1D, Labour Strengths by Division, 1981–1995.
98 ‘Flushing Out Foreign Workers in Mines Hailed’, Zambia Daily Mail, Lusaka, 21 March 2017.
99 H. Macmillan, ‘Plus Ça Change? Mining in South Africa in the Last 30 Years – An Overview’, Review of African Political Economy, 44, 152 (2012), p. 273.