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Disenclaving thePlanners’ Enclave: Thehousing projectKabitaka in Solwezi,Northwestern Zambia –Rita Kesselring! 21st August 2017 " Claire Phillips # Uncategorised$ 0

Disenclaving the Planners’Enclave: The housing projectKabitaka in Solwezi,Northwestern Zambia – RitaKesselring

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Disenclaving the Planners’ Enclave: The housing project Kab... http://copperbelt.history.ox.ac.uk/2017/08/21/disenclaving-the...

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View from pine way

Rita Kesselring is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for SocialAnthropology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Sheis the author of the book Bodies of Truth: Law, Memoryand Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (StanfordUniversity Press 2016). Her current research project dealswith the ‘new Copperbelt’ in Zambia. She also leads andcoordinates the interdisciplinary project Valueworks:Effects of Financialisation along the Copper Value Chain.Read how she describes her research in her own wordshere.

Solwezi, a bustling mining town in Zambia’s NorthwesternProvince, is known for its dust (watch a wonderful “dustreport” by Muvi TV here), its traffic jams, its chaotic growthand difficult planning processes. Most people live in denselysettled and poorly serviced areas, where electricity andpublic water supply are often inexistent. Imagine a suburbin this town with wide roads, clear boundaries around plotswhose single houses each are occupied by one small family,a functioning drainage system, pipe water. The houses,constructed on an architect’s plan, look identical; electrickitchen and bathrooms are placed inside. Instead of foreigntrucks, people you know pass by on foot or in private cars,and almost all household heads are in wage employment.You see no stray dogs, hear no loud noises, but can walk ontarred roads and see people watering their little gardens.

Such asuburb,which inmanyaspects istheopposite tomostquarters ofSolwezitown,actually exists. The 230 ha Kabitaka Hills DevelopmentProject is a housing project planned by the Zimbabweancompany ARUP and built and owned by the developer

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Kabitaka Hills Development Corporation (KHDC), a 100%subsidiary of the Canada-based First Quantum Minerals(FQML). FQML bought the Kansanshi mine north of Solwezitown in 2005 and has since turned it into the largest coppermine on the African continent by output.

Kabitaka, about 10 kilometres east of the Solwezi centre andwithin the planned expansion of the municipal boundaries,was built for middle class employees at Kansanshi Mineagainst the background of housing shortage in Solwezi. Forsome months in 2015, I lived in one of the 642 houses (outof which only 410 are currently occupied) in Kabitaka asparts of my 15 months of field research in the Solwezi area.

The first families moved to Kabitaka in January 2014. Mycolleague Chibamba Jennifer Chansa, now a PhD candidateat the University of the Free State, South Africa, undertook ahousehold survey between August and September 2015,complementing my more ethnographic approach. Thequestionnaire we used was inspired by surveys carried outby the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in the 1940s and 1950s.The number of permanent residents in a house, it emerged,ranged between two and eight. Apart from children, manyrelatives lived with the families – some permanently, someon a visiting basis. 84 out of the 87 responding families hadlived in Solwezi town before moving to Kabitaka. For 80% ofthe respondents, the place of residence before Solwezi wasin one of the Copperbelt towns. Out of the 87 family heads,only five had never lived in the Zambian Copperbelt, andonly 12 had not spend their childhood on the ZambianCopperbelt. Like many new Solwezi residents, formerly arural Kaonde-speaking area, most people in Kabitaka speakBemba, and are used to living in towns.

We could see this suburb as part of an “enclaving” project, inconjunction with the securitized mining license area and theexclusive golf estate, in which white expatriate workers andsenior to middle management of the mine live. According toHannah Appel, an exclave is a site for the extractive industryto “disentangle the production of profit from the place inwhich it happens to find itself”. Enclaves are not a given, butemerge through socio-material practices.


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Worker constructing a fence within the Kabitaka premises

Villagers protesting at the Kabitaka gate, October 2015

Has FQM succeeded in creating such an enclave for its mid-level labour to integrate them more smoothly into the globalproduction network? It is impossible to really answer thisquestion within the space provided here. However, someflashlights into the everyday life of Kabitaka’s residentsmight suggest that the notion of an enclave is too close tothe planners’ perspective to help us unravel the dynamics ofcorporate governance and people’s place-making at sites ofextraction.

As ideal and idyllic as Kabitaka might look at first sight, whenyou stay there for a while, you learn about people’sgrievances and complaints, and start seeing a number ofthings that defeat the developers’ plans.

In a protracted process, the mine received the consent touse the land from the acting Chief Kapijimpanga, and had


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Mr Zimba in his garden

the land changed from customary to lease tenure by thelocal government and the Ministry of Lands. Only veryrecently, the Solwezi Municipal Council has started toformalize the individual plots. Without security of tenure,investors have been reluctant to build, and the zoneplanned for shops lies idle.

Due to the lack of shops on site, Kabitaka is not self-contained; quite the contrary. To purchase goods, residentstravel the ten kilometres to the mitec market at theentrance of Solwezi, or even further to Shoprite or two newmalls in Solwezi town. Also, the lack of shops has triggeredthe emergence of informal activities on the Kabitakapremises. A great number of households have specializedon selling a specific good from their back door: airtime,bred, rice, mealie meal, beer, peanut butter, and tomatoes.To top up, almost everybody has a little garden on the plotgrowing rape, onions, tomatoes, Chinese cabbage,kalembula (sweet potato leaves) or chibwabwa (pumpkinleaves), and some have a pigeon or a chicken house.

Althoughresidentsare called

“homeowners” and although the aim of the project was tooffer affordable homeownership, they still rent the housesfrom KHDC more than three years into the project. KHDChas not managed to set up an affordable mortgage systemand tells residents that they “rent to buy”. Residents aresuspicious whether this is the case; and incidents of non-inheritance after the death of the homeowner have proventhem right. For employees, the rent represents about 40%of their gross salaries; people who do not live on theKabitaka premises receive the equivalent as a living-outallowance. In addition to the high rent compared to prices in


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First AGM of the Kabitaka HomeownerAssociation July 2015

Solwezi town, many families straddle at least twohouseholds, one on the Copperbelt and one in the Solweziregion. While they are currently employed by an FQMcompany, they don’t necessarily see themselves aspermanent residents in Solwezi. Most work on a short-termor mid-term contract. With little commitment from theiremployer, they are not willing to commit to a permanentmove to Solwezi.

As a result of high rental and electricity costs, transport totown and the mandatory Homeowner Association Fees,many can’t afford to send their children to the privateschool on-site but instead send them to a state school inSolwezi town.

Some of the few people I met for whom Kabitaka seemed towork well – albeit temporary – was a group of small-scaleminers, informal traders and thieves and burglars, whotrespassed against many rules outlined in the “HomeownersConduct Rules Handbook“. This group started to operatefrom within Kabitaka. One of them was employed at themine, which gave them access to a house in Kabitaka. Thehouse was where emeralds were stashed, traded and sold,and the house was where they planned their burglary ofcopper anodes on the mining area or appliances from theneighbouring houses.

InKabitaka,

governance by the mining company is clearly incomplete,flawed and contested, and – contrary to the first impression– far away from creating an ideal enclave. A number ofscholars have indeed criticized James Ferguson’s total view


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of extractive enclaves as outlined in his book “GlobalShadows” which suggests successful disconnection andcomplete independence from the environment.

Kabitaka shows that conceptually disenclaving the planners’enclaves is worthwhile to better understand the workings ofglobal extractivism. Rather than operating in completeisolation, a mine is dependent on its environment on anumber of levels. In case of a workers’ settlement, thecompany for instance depends on peoples’ willingness tostraddle multiple households inside and outside the“enclave” – just as in the earlier Copperbelt in the time of theRhodes-Livingston scholars’ classic ethnographies. It equallydepends on residents’ informal exchange of goods withinand outside the electric fence, which allows them to pay thehigh rents and school fees and liberates the workers toconcentrate on paid wage labour.

This project hasreceived funding fromthe EuropeanResearch Council (ERC)under the EuropeanUnion’s Horizon 2020research andinnovationprogramme (GrantAgreement No.681657).

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