The mines of the Zambian Copperbelt were fundamental to Zambia’s industrialization and urbanization. That urbanization and industrialization has led to the development of some of the most nuanced and extensive social science research in the world.Footnote 1 In that sense this book, which is based on a doctoral thesis completed at Sheffield University, builds upon a long and distinguished tradition. Yet it is determined by an explicit awareness of the enormity of what happened in Zambia between 1973 and 2005; a period in which the Zambian economy essentially collapsed and widespread poverty and unemployment became the norm.Footnote 2 That collapse almost destroyed what was formerly one of the most powerful trade-union movements in Africa, the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia (MUZ).
Essentially chronological in arrangement, the book is based on extensive research in Britain and Zambia, where state, company, and union archives were investigated, and on no fewer than sixty-two interviews conducted with trade unionists. Apart from an introduction and conclusion, the book consists of six chapters, parts of which have been published elsewhere as journal articles.
Apart from setting out the structure of the book, the extensive introduction deals with the mass of academic literature that has been written on the Zambian Copperbelt, dealing with issues as diverse as modernization and the “urban African”, nationalism and labour, labour history from below, and social labour studies. Harking back to the path-breaking work of the social scientists of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI), Larmer notes that they “were generally painstaking in their efforts to understand at first-hand the beliefs and behaviour of mineworkers”. In contrast, Larmer claims that most postcolonial political scientists and developmental economists have ascribed to “mineworkers a role, position, or set of beliefs without having actually talked or listened to them”. In keeping with the RLI, Larmer seeks “to explain how mineworkers’ understanding of their own position in society and economy influenced their actions in ways that had a significant political influence in post-colonial Zambia”. Larmer argues “that the dichotomy between mineworkers’ expectations for liberation, and the reality of their continuing exploitation, is the primary reason why mineworkers continued to demand substantial improvements in wages and conditions […]. In order to maintain this capacity for effective industrial action, they consistently resisted the control of their workplaces, living places, and trade union by […] the post-colonial state […] in a context of economic decline and an increasing rate of exploitation of their labour” (pp. 4–5).
Larmer’s study seeks to challenge the assumption of “virtually all post-colonial analysts” that “the mineworkers and their union were in some way politically reactionary, or simply apolitical” (p. 2). In doing this, Larmer notes that it is necessary to re-examine “what it means to be politically active in post-colonial Africa”, and “rejects the narrowing of political ideas and actions to those self-consciously concerned with such institutions [as political parties and problems of governance]” (p. 3). In addition, whilst identifying a “general Mineworkers’ consciousness”, Larmer “also rejects the depressingly common tendency to characterise unionised mineworkers as a single homogenous unit that thought and acted uniformly” (p. 4).
The first chapter, which is based primarily on secondary literature, is an overview of the development of the mining industry on the Copperbelt beginning in the early 1930s. Of crucial importance in this period was the development of a de facto colour bar separating “European” and “African” jobs. Nonetheless, through the use of industrial action and organization African mineworkers were able to improve their incomes and working and living conditions. In addition, this chapter deals with the development of trade-union movements on the Copperbelt and the manner in which, by the time Zambia had been granted independence in 1964, a level of mutual distrust had developed between political parties and the trade-union movement. In the face of authoritarianism on the part of the colonial state and mining corporations, African mineworkers were able to establish “a militant and effective mineworkers’ union” (p. 40), which was not necessarily identical to the nationalist movement.
The following chapter explores the postcolonial political and economic development of Zambia. It illustrates the way in which a number of differing issues came together to threaten and delegitimize the claims of mineworkers. Thus, in the specific historical circumstances of Zambia as a newly independent state bordered on all sides by white minority regimes, external threats in combination with certain developmental assumptions converged in opposition to the hopes and aspirations of mineworkers and Zambian city dwellers. Politically, this culminated in the declaration of the one-party state in 1972, whilst economically things came to a head in 1973 with the global oil crisis and the subsequent collapse in copper prices; “from this point on, the state’s central task was to police the discontent” (p. 58). In the chapters that follow, Larmer explores the role of Zambian mineworkers in seeking to realize the expectations of postcolonial economic and social transformation.
Larmer argues that the failure of the postcolonial government to implement a radical redistribution of wealth was “not a technical inevitability but the result of political decisions […] that were actively contested by popular movements” (p. 60). However, as Larmer demonstrates, a union leadership allied with the political party that had inherited independence did not necessarily enjoy the support of the majority of union members, “who sought to ensure their movement’s autonomy from political control and criticised leaders seen as too close to the Party and Government” (p. 95). This was particularly the case when, following strikes in 1966, the mineworkers’ union was unable to ensure equal pay for equal work or to prevent a series of wildcat strikes “occurring two or three times a month across the Copperbelt” (p. 81). Larmer quotes from a letter written by a winding engine driver who threatened to leave the union: “Immediately a Zambian took over this job, his salary was slashed to less than half the salary of an expatriate driver. […] How can you call this Zambianisation when after taking over the job from an expatriate, you don’t qualify to live in the house he had?” (p. 83).
In chapter 4, aptly entitled “Talking in Dark Corners”, Larmer describes in graphic detail the effects on mineworkers on the Copperbelt of the establishment of a one-party state and of Zambia’s economic collapse. The effects of food shortages are illustrated by the remarks of a trade unionist quoted by Larmer: “you would go down underground. Then, just in the cage you’ll find somebody fainting. You’ll take him to the central place and what is happening, for the past two days I haven’t eaten. Why? […] My wife has been queuing up for mealie meal. There’s no mealie meal” (p. 127).
Not surprisingly, by 1981 the trade-union movement had come to be seen as the de facto, if not necessarily de jure, political opposition in Zambia. In the course of the following decade, the labour movement would become the locus for the development of an effective and eventually legal political opposition that would end one-party rule in Zambia. Chapter 5 describes how, in that difficult decade, mineworkers managed to meet, organize, and ensure that their union came to form an effective opposition to the UNIP.
Far from presenting a triumphalist account of mineworkers who have achieved political liberty and the right to organize, the final chapter describes the dramatic effects of economic liberalization and privatization on the Copperbelt. Following the re-establishment of multi-party democracy in Zambia, the new MMD government, under the former trade unionist Frederick Chiluba, introduced wide-ranging “structural adjustment programmes” that completely liberalized and privatized the entire Zambian economy. Despite the fact that mineworkers were instrumental in bringing about political liberalization, they were unable to continue to defend their economic position in the new era of wholesale liberalization and privatization. By 2000, all Zambia’s mines had been privatized in a process that contravened the requirements of Zambia’s Privatisation Act and that was permeated by extensive corruption. More than half of Zambia’s mineworkers were made redundant, and all their social amenities, ranging from housing to health and education, were privatized. In some cases mines and mining communities were asset-stripped and allowed to be bankrupted and destroyed.
Ultimately, Larmer’s detailed and worthy work makes for depressing reading, for the values ascribed by Larmer to Zambia’s trade unionist mineworkers have been consistently denied them. “These values include: an aspiration for relative equality of consumption and of sacrifice; a demand for the adequate valuation and compensation of hard and hazardous work; an expectation of the public accountability of political and labour leadership to their constituencies; and a desire for natural and human resources to be utilised for the improvement of society as a whole” (p. 197).
This is a clear and detailed history that does justice to the trade unionists with whom it so clearly empathizes. One minor point, which in no way detracts from Larmer’s work: the map provided is unclear and not up to the standard of the rest of the volume.
