Geoforum 45 (2013) 240–247

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Geoforum

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‘You cannot make a camel drink water’: Capital, geo-history and contestationsin the Zambian Copperbelt

Rohit NegiSchool of Human Ecology, Ambedkar University, Delhi, Sector 9, Dwarka, New Delhi 110 075, India

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 3 August 2012Received in revised form 7 November 2012Available online 11 January 2013

Keywords:MiningCapitalismLaborTribeZambiaAfrica

0016-7185/$ - see front matter � 2012 Elsevier Ltd. Ahttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.11.010

E-mail address: rohit@aud.ac.in

a b s t r a c t

After prolonged economic decline, Africa is being seen widely as having turned the corner. Relatively highrates of economic growth have been witnessed since the early 2000s, in part due to the China-driven glo-bal commodity boom. In addition to older established enclaves, investment has flown into new mineralreserves. Zambia’s North Western Province (NWP)—now popularly called the New Copperbelt—has beenone of the nodes of the mining boom in that country. Two large foreign-owned mines started operation inNWP’s Solwezi District between 2004 and 2009, employing more than 7000 workers. Concomitant tothis, thousands of migrants also arrived seeking jobs and a share of the myriad business opportunitiesthus created. The mining-induced transformation of the previously subsistence-based region was, how-ever, accompanied by autochthonous claims on its supposed developmental benefits. Keen to be seen associally responsible, these claims were recognized by one of the two mining companies, which put inplace an affirmative action system for the local Kaonde people, who were identified as the beneficiarycommunity. But the system faced opposition from other job seekers, who alleged that it was an instanceof tribalism, an accusation of considerable force in postcolonial Zambia. Using archival, historical, andethnographic material, this paper argues that neither the delineation of the beneficiaries nor the contes-tations around tribe are self-evident processes. They emerge from the articulations of extractive capital-ism with a specific geo-historical context, one where the legacies of colonialism continue to inform thestate, economy and citizenship.

� 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

‘‘The Kaonde, they are not very developed’’

–R. Sinyambe, Non-Kaonde from North Western Province, Sol-wezi 19 January 2008.

‘‘You cannot employ people from one family to such a big companylike Lumwana. I mean Kaonde people; they are more like one fam-ily. As a family, a company does not last long’’–M. Musonda, Immigrant from Copperbelt, Solwezi 29 April2008.

‘‘Like the walls of the Biblical Jericho, tribalism [is] falling downbefore the forces of nationalism and industrialization’’–Kenneth Kaunda, Independent Zambia’s first President (1966,p. 43).

Observers of Africa are likely to have noticed a recent shift inmedia representations of the continent. It seems that, in a dramaticturnaround, Africa is set to become the next economic ‘tiger’(Kristof, 2012; The Economist, 2011). As an element of this broader

ll rights reserved.

shift, Zambia looks set to regain its position as one of the ten big-gest economies in Africa by 2021, a position that it had lost duringthe 1990s (Business Monitor International, 2011). In large part thisis due to the rise of China as the node of global capital’s expansionat the turn of the century—helped of course by other so-called‘emerging’ economies—and the consequent increase in demandfor and prices of various natural resources, including copper (Car-mody, 2009). Chinese investment in Zambia has topped $2 billion,1

which is to be seen alongside the fact that the largest investments inmining industry there have actually been from other sources. Zam-bia, then, has been one of the ‘rising stars’ of the neoliberal globalmining scenario (Bridge, 2004a).

This mineral boom is, however, overlaid on a specific geo-his-torical context, one that shapes its discursive presence and there-fore, political situatedness. Part of the Zambian story has beenthe expansion of capital into spaces hitherto at its margins, ofwhich North Western Province is an exemplar. The region is partof the mineral rich Central African Copperbelt that includes theKatanga Province of DR Congo and the historical mining towns of

1 Figure mentioned in speech by the Chinese Ambassador at the University ofambia, 3 April 2012. http://zm.chineseembassy.org/eng/sgzxdthxx/t920669.htm.

Z

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the Copperbelt Province in Zambia. In NWP, two large mines—Kansanshi and Lumwana—started operation in the Solwezi District(earning it the epithet New Copperbelt) between 2004 and 2009,directly employing 7000 workers, but more generally, leading tothe sudden transformation of the region.2 NWP has been histori-cally related to capital as a reserve of migrant labor working in themines of the Copperbelt Province, while retaining forms of subsis-tence agriculture akin to what in the case of South Africa HaroldWolpe had termed the ‘articulation of modes of production’(1972), or the simultaneous and persistent mutualism of pre-capital-ist and capitalist economies. In most of NWP, property is under acustomary form of tenure, and the state-recognized traditional chiefsmediate access to land and other resources. Moreover, rural subjectsin Zambia, following the legacies of colonial indirect rule, are consid-ered to possess tribal affiliation in addition to a national one (Mam-dani, 1996). This intersection of extractive capital and seemingly‘non-modern’ forms of property and citizenship form the locus ofthis paper.

The privatization of the mining industry in Zambia through the1990s, and the above-mentioned boom of the next decade form thecontext to this investigation. Today, revenues generated from min-ing in contemporary Zambia find their way into the place of theiroperation through workers’ wages, the place’s share of taxes col-lected by the central government, and through the companies’charity-like contributions that go by the term Corporate SocialResponsibility (CSR) (Negi, 2011). Indeed, in the neoliberal era sucha redistributive mechanism linking mining and society throughCSR has become the global norm. It is though a relatively new phe-nomenon in Zambia and emerged from the ruins of state-led min-eral extraction, which gave way to privatization as part of a wide-ranging structural adjustment program. Prior to that, the mines’relations with localities were of a ‘thick’ kind (Ferguson, 2005),where the state-owned company operated what has been termeda ‘cradle to grave’ connection with the workers, and with them,the larger community (Fraser and Lungu, 2007). In addition to per-manent jobs, good salaries and benefits, mining towns saw signif-icant investments in social life of the workers, including thecreation of cultural centers, women’s clubs, and football teams;things that now seem to belong to a different era. Yet, coming asit did after two decades of economic decline and also fiscal ‘auster-ity’ enforced by multilateral agencies and undertaken by succes-sive national governments, there were genuine ‘expectations ofmodernity’ (Ferguson, 1999) in Solwezi in the 2000s. State andpopular discourses alike conceived of the place’s transformationthrough the contextually mediated trope of development. It wasbelieved that as a result of new investment and economic growth,and given enough time, Solwezi would resemble the urbanity ofthe cities of the Copperbelt Province to the southeast, which iswhat modern life in Zambia is popularly believed to resemble (Ibid,pp. 207–233).

It was at this precise juncture that the matter of who the bene-ficiaries of development should be gained salience. Mr. Musonda’squote (above) presciently lays out the stakes of the debate. It al-ludes to a politics in Solwezi that turned around competing claimsto the material benefits of the mining boom. Calls to make the newinvestment count for the indigenous and historically ‘backward’Solwezi Kaonde people came up against the expectations of immi-grants who moved in numbers to the area to chart an escape frompoverty and unemployment, while also being pulled-in by the lureof the region’s economic transformation. These tensions weremade concrete and reinforced by the tribal-logic of labor recruit-ment in one of the newly opened mines. It put in place a system

2 Since the completion of fieldwork (June 2008), the construction of another large-scale new copper mine, Trident, has been initiated in Kalumbila in NWP.

that worked through three local chiefs and reserved several thou-sand, mostly unskilled, jobs for local Kaonde people. This was inpart a preemptive response to the increased and vocal presenceof transnational activist groups advocating ‘responsible mining’of a kind that benefits the local ‘community’. In response, job seek-ers—for whom mining employment is a ticket to relative prosper-ity—were displeased with this system, framing their opposition bypointing out the supposed inability of Kaonde workers to performwage labor and by alleging the tribalist—hence, divisive—nature ofaffirmative employment.

The paper contends that neither the identification of the Kaondeas a beneficiary community nor the tribe-focused contestations areas self-evident as they may seem. Using archival material and his-torical accounts, it reveals the conditions of possibility for the tribe-focused political contestations that surfaced during the miningboom in Solwezi. It then draws on insights from 8 months of field-work carried out in 2007–2008 to examine its expressions andimplications. The fieldwork involved over forty semi-structuredinterviews with various agents in and around Solwezi, and theobservation of social life in the region during the process of itstransformation. The causal structures identified here would be ofinterest to scholars interested in grounded, geographical analysisof Africa’s economic growth and, in particular, the extension ofcapital to places beyond the established enclaves.

2. Capital and tribe

Scholars of Africa have noted an upsurge in autochthonous dis-courses in the era of globalization (Boone, 2007; Geschiere andJackson, 2006; Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, 2000). With it, the studyof the tribe has returned to the agenda. A previous generation ofprogressive scholars was inclined to disavow the tribe because ithad been historically equated with ‘primitive’ social configura-tions, especially within colonial epistemes (Ekeh, 1990; Mafeje,1971; Southall, 1970). A response to the dilemma was to considerthe tribe as a specifically cultural construct, uniquely African andtherefore to be celebrated despite its otherwise problematic con-notations (Mitchell, 1970, p. 84). I contend, however, that neitherthe disavowal nor a culturalist-bent is very useful when one ap-proaches categories empirically. To be sure, and just like national-ism, the tribe is a synthetic concept, one in the ‘creation’ (Rangerand Hobsbawm, 1983) or ‘invention’ (Vail, 1989) of which colonial-ism is fundamentally implicated. But this critique does not explainthe continued purchase of the construct on the continent or itspolitical significance. Indeed, in contrast to Kenneth Kaunda’squote (above) about the predicted modernization-induced obsoles-cence of the tribe in public life, it is the capitalist transformation ofSolwezi that has triggered politics hinged on tribal belonging.Writing about Cameroon, Geschiere and Nyamnjoh (2000) arguethat capitalism is ‘‘about the ‘freeing’ of labor as a necessary condi-tion for creating a mobile mass of wage-laborers; yet in many in-stances it has also brought with it determined efforts tocompartmentalize labor, imposing classifications—ever changing,but all the more powerful in order to facilitate control over thelabor market’’ (p. 426; see also Konings, 1996). Certainly, even inZambian history, mining companies have segmented labor on tri-bal lines since the earliest days, and attempted to use—with vary-ing degrees of success—the authority of chiefs and elders to controllabor on the copper mines (Henderson, 1975).

I believe that in Solwezi, however, the tribe-based process ofrecruitment is not so much about labor control or workplacedynamics as it is about the reconfigured relationship of contempo-rary extractive capital with its ‘publics’. The last three decades orso have seen an emergence of new so-called stakeholders in extrac-tive capitalism as in other industries (Pidgeon and Rogers-Hayden,

242 R. Negi / Geoforum 45 (2013) 240–247

2007; Chander and Sunder, 2004; Fortun, 2004). In addition to cap-ital, the state and workers, its publics now include the peoplewhose lands and resources the mines encroach upon or abut, andtransnational civil society groupings that claim to speak for the lo-cals and/or nature (see Bridge, 2004b). This is in part an outcome ofcontestations around what are generally perceived to be the partic-ularly pernicious effects of extractive industries (consider forinstance the currency of the phrase ‘resource curse’). Well-publi-cized cases like Brent Spar (nature) and the Ogoni struggle (com-munity)—both involving Shell—have been important watershedsin this process (Livesay, 2001). Since then, several large and smallcompanies have been in the crosshairs of transnational activistnetworks that object to capital’s alleged exploitative practices to-wards nature and communities (Hilson, 2002). Groups like theExtractive Industries Transparency International, Greenpeace andMiningWatch Canada now have the capacity to track the workingsof mines around the world. At the national scale, and being a dem-ocratic polity, several Zambian non-governmental watchdogs keepan eye on the mining sector. These include the Civil Society for Pov-erty Reduction, Caritas Zambia, and an academic-led networkcalled MineWatch Zambia. These groups have been particularlyadept at mobilizing opinion related to mining and developmentthrough the popular press, and since the early 2000s public disaf-fection with privatization has grown in Zambia, a process that cul-minated in 2008 in the national government’s decision to impose anew and more redistributive taxation regime on the mining indus-try, though its attempts were somewhat stifled by the global crisis(see Fraser and Larmer, 2010).

In response, and with the universalization of the principle ofsustainable development, capital has also shifted its rhetoric andto some extent practices accordingly (Munshi and Kurian, 2005).Concepts like environmental trusteeship and community develop-ment are now a routine part of capital’s operation in localities—including in Zambia—though of course with considerable uneven-ness of practice. But as Cori Hayden notes, while ‘‘this notion of(modified, green) capitalism requires—or at least strongly re-quests—community’’, the latter is not a self-evident artifact waitingto be uplifted from presumed backwardness and poverty, but mustbe made visible and fenced (2003, p. 362). In Solwezi, it meant thatthe Kaonde belonging to the local chieftaincies became the benefi-ciary community of these performances of responsible mining.3

The delineation though defined the non-Kaonde as its ‘other’, there-by creating clear faultlines.

There are certainly many other new mining developments inZambia at the moment, within and outside the Copperbelt. Mostof these are foreign-investment based, with a substantial expatri-ate management, and have Zambian blue-collar workers. However,within the latter, employment is mostly through labor contractorswho are engaged in a race to the bottom (Fraser and Lungu, 2007).The difference is that the Kaonde people of Solwezi managed to se-cure favorable terms of employment (including the affirmative ac-tion mechanism, skill upgradation in mining work, training inagriculture, etc.) through the articulation of their demands, andLumwana’s attempts to forge a specific kind of Corporate SocialResponsibility program. To the extent that Lumwana is being con-sidered an exemplar and a model to be emulated, the processesdiscussed in what follows are likely to assume even greatersalience.

For their part, a discursive tool the migrants drew on to delegit-imize local claims was to allege what is commonly termed tribal-

3 In 2011, Equinox, the majority owner of Lumwana, was acquired by Canada-based Barrick Gold Corporation. Barrick, however, made public its desire to continue‘responsible mining’ at Lumwana. http://barrickbeyondborders.com/2011/08/barrick-gold-new-zambian-mine/

ism. This corresponds to the second of two meanings of tribalismin modern Africa noted by Peter Ekeh (1990) following Aidan Sout-hall (1970). The first sense is to denote one’s affiliation to and iden-tification with a tribe-based mode of living, where the tribe isconsidered to have a ‘‘high degree of self-sufficiency at a near sub-sistence level, based on a relatively simple technology withoutwriting or literature, politically autonomous and with its owndistinctive language, culture and sense of identity’’ (Southall,1970, p. 28). The second use of tribalism is as a political invectivesignifying one’s preference for the tribe at the cost of the nation. Itis a charge that is often leveled in postcolonial Zambia to delegiti-mize certain claims, and moreover, it sticks.

The paper argues that the presence of tribe in responsible cap-italism and in its critique is composed of three intersecting pro-cesses with their origins in Zambia’s experience of colonialism(geo-history): the persistence of a tribal framework for the studyof natives; the continuing tribal logic of governance; and the his-torically uneven development of capitalism. The next section shalldevelop this interpretive framework, drawing on historical litera-ture and archival material, before the paper turns its attention tothe emergent contestations in Solwezi.

3. Geo-history of the tribe: anthropology, state, capitalism

The tribe has long been considered the scale of social reproduc-tion in Africa (Crehan, 1997; Schumaker, 2001). As an object ofanthropology and governance, it came to be viewed as the basicunit around which native life was organized and each tribe wasconsidered to be the African parallel of Eurocentrically conceived‘nations’, that is, each was presumed to inhabit a fixed territory.Moreover, each tribe was believed to possess certain inherenttraits—not unlike the characterization of, for instance, the Belgiansas ‘plucky’—which made them more or less suited to certain kindsof productive labor and thought.

The problem was that these ideas were not a prior fact but anoutcome of colonial administration and epistemologies. A key parthere was played by anthropologists at work in the region, who con-ducted many studies of various so-called tribes in what was then,Northern Rhodesia. In particular, the Rhodes Livingstone Institute(RLI) based in Livingstone was a regional center for the study of na-tives, and made a profound impact on the disciplines of anthropol-ogy and sociology. In keeping with the vision of its second andmost influential director Max Gluckman, RLI viewed Northern Rho-desia as a ‘laboratory’ (Schumaker, 2001) for the study of the tribe,considered as an unchanging entity (people without history). Thisview was of a general kind amongst those trained in classical eth-nography where the immersed anthropologist could understand aself-contained and aboriginal tribe inside out (Werbner, 1984).Each scholar therefore became an expert on at least one tribe(e.g. Elizabeth Colson: BaTonga; Max Gluckman: Barotse; HansHolleman: MaShona), but also placed, with the use of the ‘ex-tended case method’, the particular case within theoretical framesand the wider context (Burawoy, 1998). To that extent, therefore,the RLI scholars were different from, and as it turns out, aheadof, their counterparts elsewhere who modeled their ethnographicsites as self-contained systems, bounded and practically isolated(Schumaker, 1996, p. 239). In a seminal work (1956), for instance,Clyde Mitchell makes arguments about the social structure and in-ter-group dynamics in the Copperbelt through a meticulous analy-sis of the Kalela Dance. RLI also focused on the process ofurbanization that had taken shape as a result of large-scale miningin Northern Rhodesia. Here, the interpretive frames of RLI oftenwent against the grain of the given notions of Africans as essentiallytribal, and by association, primitive. Consider the words of an influ-ential colonial official:

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‘‘. . . natives who have worked for long at secular industrial cen-ters. . .have become detribalised. . . I believe that we will find inthis class—the natives heathenised by contact with us—a mostvaluable finger post, and a most salutary warning if we willbut take it. Let us beware that we do not turn the devoutly reli-gious natives of Africa into heathens. There is a risk of this.Every centre of European employment provides this risk: everyMission centre also provides it.’’ (Melland, 1923, p. 297)

Such notions of the natives resonated with those held by Euro-pean settlers, who favored the radical segregation of natives andapplied influx control mechanisms, arguing that urbanizationwas alienating Africans from their culture. These policies and theideological case for their establishment owed a lot to the fact thatmany settlers in the territory had moved there from Southern Rho-desia and South Africa, colonies where the supposed ill-effects ofdetribalization formed the basis of accepted thinking (Legassick,1974).

In Northern Rhodesia, however, these ideas ran into worthyopponents in the RLI. Interested in the shifting forms of associa-tions in urban settings (Epstein, 1953), RLI researchers disagreedwith the settlers’ assessment that African urbanization was to becountered. As Gluckman’s famous statement—‘an African tribes-man is a tribesman, a miner is a miner’ (1960, p. 57)—implied,urbanization was for RLI a progressive process, and they believedAfricans were fully capable of becoming modern urban subjects,like the Europeans had. In his critique of RLI, however, James Fer-guson (1999) points out that Gluckman and others were part of thecolonial apparatus that they seemed opposed to, albeit they werethe progressives within it. This particular debate has turned acri-monious in Zambian historiography (see Ferguson, 1994; Macmil-lan, 1993), and I do not wish to arbitrate it. My point is simply that,and ironically, by disputing the saliency of ‘pure’ tribalism in theurban areas, progressive researchers in fact entrenched the ideathat rural Africans were by nature tribal.

As for the Kaonde, they were of significantly less anthropologi-cal interest than their Bemba, Lozi, or Tonga counterparts, thoughwith notable exceptions (Melland, 1919, 1923). A few early textstherefore have disproportionately informed the wider view of thearea and its population. A key player in making the Kaonde ‘legible’was an early colonial official Frank Melland, who during the 1910senthusiastically took up the mantle of not only administering, butalso describing the Kaonde in ways that fit the ‘tribal’ frame. Mel-land served at the Solwezi Boma during the initial stages of theestablishment of colonial administration, a period when the state’scomprehension of the region was very limited. His detailed noteson the Kaonde in the District Notebook of Solwezi and their elabo-ration in the form of a manuscript (1923) brought the Kaondewithin the circuits of knowledge.

While there were people who spoke Chi-Kaonde, for Mellandthis fact alone was enough to consider the Kaonde as a tribe, de-spite the concept’s presumed characteristics of cohesion, self-con-scious understanding of its members as different from others, andthe potential for collective action based on belonging. But linguisticdifference between so-called tribes is less self-evident than itseems on first look—when for instance do quantitative differencesin various versions of a dialect become qualitative differences be-tween distinct languages? Such classifications therefore requiredboundary making on the part of Melland and others.

A close reading of Melland shows that first; the people heencountered in this region and termed the Kaonde tribe were orga-nized as clans, often warring, and without a larger notion of com-mon—tribal—unity. Second, the clans were in a process of constantsplintering and reuniting, thereby giving them a fluid nature. Third,there was considerable movement of people between clans, oftenthose that in fact spoke different dialects. Many a times this move-

ment would be the result of battles, whence individuals fromlosing clans would become the subjects of the winner. This fluidityinduced moments of self-doubt in Melland. In a section on wars, hewrites: ‘‘As a rule, wars were not tribal. The Kaonde tribe, if it is tobe so called, never appears to have fought as a tribe’’ (p. 271). Atanother point, he adds scare-quotes to the term, saying that theirhistory ‘‘shows the extraordinarily broken nature of this ‘tribe’from its beginning until to-day’’ (p. 44). And yet, Melland termedthe people who inhabited the region a tribe, which fit with theavailable lens of viewing natives. As Crehan notes, the subjectsinhabiting these areas also gained a sense of peoplehood, whichmarked them from others around them (Kaonde as sorghum plant-ers as opposed millet or cassava, for instance), but this was a resultof colonial administration and not a prior fact (1997). Moreover,like other tribes across the region the Kaonde were territorializedinto various different chieftaincies under the custodianship of par-ticular chiefs.

In this manner the Solwezi region was enrolled into what Mam-dani argues (1996) was the defining feature of African state-form:its bifurcated nature. For various historical reasons, colonialstates—whether French or British or later on the Portuguese—con-verged on the policy of indirect rule to govern their territories inAfrica. In brief, while the colonial state ruled the cities and areasdominated by white settlement directly, imposed civil law and cre-ated a bureaucracy; in the areas where indigenous peoples werelargely left to their own devices, it ruled through what weretermed traditional or native authorities led by the chiefs. Mamdaninotes that in many instances the rule of the latter was extremelyviolent and created situations of ‘decentralized despotism’, withthe chief as the head of the system.

After independence, postcolonial African states were faced withthe task of redressing the oppression witnessed during colonialrule. Mamdani notes two responses. On the one hand, there werethe radical states like Senegal, Mozambique, and Julius Nyerere’sTanzania, that embarked on a process of ‘detribalization’ andthereby altered the structure of the customary authorities. Butthe problem, as it emerged, was that the decentralized form of des-potism soon turned into a centralized despotism where chiefs werereplaced with party functionaries, and demands for forced labor orcropping were imposed not for colonial appropriation but in thename of modernization or national development (Mamdani,1996, p. 103). In most cases, however, the postcolonial state letthe structures of indirect rule remain while trying to incorporatethem through various means. Thus the countryside continued tobe tied to traditional authorities and the population to their ‘ethnichomelands’. Civil rights were deracialized in urban areas, but re-mained tribalized in the latter. This meant that all Africans werenow equal citizens of the postcolonial state, but that the logic ofindigeneity continued in the countryside. As Mamdani writes,‘‘. . .in privileging the indigenous over the nonindigenous, weturned the colonial world upside down, but we did not change it.As a result... Indigeneity remained the test for rights.’’ (2002, p.258). In certain extreme cases groups that were identified as theinauthentic Other—Indians in Idi Amin’s Uganda and the Tutsis(Banyamulenge) in Eastern Congo—were targeted by those whoclaimed territory and resources based on their indigeneity (Mam-dani, 2002, p. 262; Vlassenroot, 2002). The tensions of the legaciesof colonial rule, however, lie dormant more generally.

To sum up the discussion so far, rural Africans, like those whoinhabited Solwezi region, were considered essentially tribal, wereterritorialized in chieftaincies, and governed through indirect rule.It was though with the operation of capitalism during colonialismthat the various tribes came to incorporated with considerableunevenness in the larger economy. There appeared then a develop-mental gap between and within the various tribes. To begin, thiswas on account of the belief of physical and intellectual character-

244 R. Negi / Geoforum 45 (2013) 240–247

istics of particular tribes as essentially distinct from others, whichin turn led to their categorization as more or less suited to partic-ular aspects of the colonial division of labor (Luchembe, 1992). Inthe Copperbelt Province, the Lovale were considered to be unclean,which had to do with their occupational position as night-soilremovers (Siegel, 1988). These are distinctions that take on a lifeof their own, are internalized by subjects, and continue to findwidespread purchase.

As early as 1910, a British South Africa Company official wroteabout the Kaonde in Solwezi District that they ‘‘are of exceptionallyfine physique and are said by those who employ them to be mostsatisfactory mining natives [sic] of which the province can boast’’(Luchembe, 1992, p. 38). It was also thought that they were essen-tially a docile tribe. As the District Commissioner wrote of theKaonde: ‘‘I do not think that there is any sign of disloyalty amongstthe native nor any disaffection. . .They certainly look up with re-spect to the officers who are put to look after them. . . and few trav-ellers go far into the country without noticing the general goodunderstanding as a striking fact’’.4 But if one looks closer, it is clearthat these early colonial representations of the Kaonde were far fromconsistent. In 1912 an official complained about natives’ resistance,saying that the natives were ‘‘of a more restless and lawless disposi-tion than those tribes to the east and south of them. . .the numerouscases of murder on very slight provocation show that very little va-lue is placed on human life’’. Of course, the colonialists themselvesplaced very little value on natives’ life; the same officer adds noncha-lantly ‘‘to signify disapproval of the lawlessness displayed, their vil-lages. . .were destroyed by my order’’.5 Meanwhile, in response tocoercive recruitment in and work on the Kansanshi mine in the earlyyears of the 20th century, situation had turned tense and the Kaondewere, according to a colonial official, ‘in a dangerous mood’ (quotedin Siegel, 1988). Kate Crehan has noted similar inconsistencies incolonial accounts of the Kaonde. For instance, descriptions of theirphysique differed wildly from describing it as ‘fine’ to calling theKaonde ‘under nourished, morose, and diseased’ (Crehan, 1997, p.66). While industry never quite took off in NWP, the Kaonde wereonly peripherally involved in the development of mining towns ofthe Copperbelt, taking up less attractive occupations as itineranthawking and piecework, and alongside others from their region, san-itation work including nightsoil removal (Mitchell, 1956; Spearpoint,1937).

Colonial epistemes though showed much greater consistencyregarding the Bemba, who were generally seen as ‘healthy andhard-working tribe’ (Luchembe, 1992, p. 39), especially suitablefor tough mining work; and in part this is why recruitment forthe mines was carried out most vigorously in Bemba territories(Perrings, 1979). Moreover, there was also a preference for nativeworkers from farther away than those considered close to themines. It was believed that the former, having traveled long dis-tances in harsh conditions to reach the mines, were more willingto undertake longer spells of work and less likely to leave employ-ment on what were considered flimsy grounds (Spearpoint, 1937).Aggressive recruiting in turn articulated with ongoing shifts in theeconomy of Bemba-land. Unlike others inhabiting south-centralAfrica, the Bemba people were less dependent on agriculture orcattle, their subsistence was based instead on fishing and on com-merce with Swahili and Arab traders. As a means to monopolizecommerce and to manage the labor and bodies of natives, however,one of the first and successful missions of British officials was toprohibit this very trade (Gann, 1958, pp. 9–14). Further, the fearof an impending sleeping sickness epidemic in their territory madecolonial officials resettle several thousand Bemba from the banks

4 National Archives of Zambia (NAZ), BS2 A 2/4/1, Administrator to High Commis-sioner Pretoria, 20 December 1910.

5 NAZ, BS3 A 2/2/2, DC Kasempa to Administrator, 25 March 1912.

of the river Luapula between 1905 and 1912 (Macola, 2002, pp.203–206). There was also a simultaneous ban on fishing in thewaters of Luapula and on other smaller rivers and lakes on thegrounds that the disease-carrying tsetse fly trawled these spaces.6

At the same time, by 1910 a tax regime was also firmly in place inthe territory that required payment in cash.

The disruption in their productive livelihoods and the need tosecure tax-money forced many from this region to look for alter-nate means of securing livelihood, and they followed recruitersin large numbers to the copper mines. The upshot was that therewas a predominance of Bemba workers on the Copperbelt, and indue course, a variant of Chi-Bemba, the so-called ‘town Bemba’ be-came the lingua franca of the area (Parpart, 1983, p. 62). Impor-tantly, their dominant position in the colonial economy moved—after Independence—onto the political sphere, where Bembas arestill believed to enjoy a disproportionate access to the state (Pos-ner, 2005, pp. 97–101). In contrast, their peripheral position withregards to copper capitalism over the 20th Century ensured thatKaonde have been largely marginal to the Zambian state and econ-omy, and are widely thought of as ‘backward’, as the opening quotesuggests.

In sum, the essentialization of the tribe—via an articulation ofcolonial administration and anthropology—as the most basic scaleof organization created the conditions for the ascription of tribe-based government that characterized indirect rule in NorthernRhodesia. It was also territorialized in the form of homelands foreach tribe, where access to land and resources was reserved formembers, with the chiefs and headmen as the gatekeepers. Thedevelopmental gap among the various tribes emerged as colonialcapitalism was overlaid on this administrative system, and byand large, this spatial order has been reinforced by the enclaveform (Ferguson, 2005) of capitalism that has emerged regionallyin more recent times, with its tendency to concentrate capital in al-ready more developed locales, while being largely unmoored fromthe hinterland.

4. Labor and contestations in the New Copperbelt

The Zambian economy entered a period of slump in the 1970s,which became a major crisis through the 1980s. Under donor pres-sure, the country was forced to implement one of the most wide-ranging structural adjustment programs in Africa. More than 200state enterprises were sold, while others went unsold and there-fore were discontinued (Nellis, 2005, p. 16). In terms of the geogra-phy of decline, and in keeping with that of copper mining, theeffects of the decline were most poignant in the Copperbelt Prov-ince. From a net in-migration of over 20% in the period 1960–1980, Copperbelt Province witnessed net out-migration of 6.1%from 1990 to 2000, while its share of the Zambian population de-clined from 22% in 1980 to 16% in 2000 (Central Statistical Office,2001; Potts, 2005). Centers like Luanshya and Chingola, whollydependent on mining, were reduced to ‘ghost towns’ during thisperiod as mines closed, businesses bolted, and residents saw theirproperties massively devalued (Larmer, 2005). As discussed, theBemba-speaking people from the Northern and Luapula Provincesof Zambia, with a history of migration to the Copperbelt, form themajority of workers and residents on the Copperbelt.

Fortuitously, the Asian economies, with their seemingly insatia-ble demand for various natural resources, led to a sustained world-wide boom in the mineral extraction sector at the turn of thecentury. With copper consistently selling for over $3/lb and withan operational mining cost of around $1/ lb, which large-scale openpit mines in Africa work with, the metal suddenly became a

6 BSAC III, National Archives of Zambia.

R. Negi / Geoforum 45 (2013) 240–247 245

lucrative investment. The Kansanshi reserve in Solwezi, hithertosporadically mined, was taken over by Canadian-owned FirstQuantum Minerals (FQM) in 2001. It was later refurbished andhas been extensively mined by FQM (over 200,000 ton of copper)for consistently sizeable revenues (over $2 billion in 2011).7 In con-trast, the Lumwana Copper Mine—conceived, planned and con-structed by Australia-based Equinox Minerals—is a Greenfieldinvestment; the largest new copper mine on the continent. Kansan-shi is close to Solwezi town, operates largely on land historicallyalienated, nationalized and privatized again, and most employees re-side in Solwezi. With the transformation of Solwezi, many localsplaced their lot in the capitalist economy from taking up jobs inthe mines to retooling their farming practices to sell vegetablesand other food items to the new population. Several former mine-workers from the Copperbelt also moved to Solwezi to find employ-ment, and were followed by others who hoped to make a living byproviding assorted services to the mine and the workers. Migrantsand locals alike, then, looked to tap into the capital flowing intothe area. It is this context that expectations of long-overdue develop-ment of the local Kaonde collide with the hopes of those from out-side, predominantly the Bemba-speakers from the Copperbelt whocame looking for employment.8 As early as 2003, there were protestsin Solwezi on the matter. According to a news report, ‘‘Residents ofSolwezi [. . .] protested against alleged marginalization by ownersof Kansanshi mine in preference of people from the Copperbelt towork on the mine’’ (Banda, 2003). The claims of indigenous Kaondeto benefits from ‘their’ resources were then pitted against those ofthe urbanized Bemba-speakers from the Copperbelt, who could notclaim similar rights in North Western Province.

The Lumwana mine, on the other hand, constructed an entiretown ‘in the bush’. This development took place on land that waspart of three Kaonde chieftaincies (Mumena, Matebo, Mukumbi)and was handed to Equinox by the Zambian government—the Pres-ident retains ultimate authority over land—but the company stillengaged with the chiefs in a few different ways. This was in partbecause of the chiefs’ control over access to land and because com-panies are eager to be on good terms with them, for the chiefs re-main—formally and informally—the representatives of their ruralsubjects. Chiefs are especially outspoken on matters of develop-ment, for their own mandate is strongly tied to the material wellbeing of their subjects. Zambian newspapers regularly carry re-ports of one or the other chief complaining about private busi-nesses. Their voices reach the nation-state also through the arenaof the ‘House of Chiefs’, which is a constitutional body that advisesthe government on rural affairs and matters related to the chief-taincies. The chiefs are, in other words, an influential interestgroup, which mining companies in the new enclave are obligedto negotiate with.

At these moments of engagement, the chiefs around Lumwanaput forth their argument related to local development. Accordingto Chief Mukumbi:

‘‘[This area] has suffered some economic malaise from indepen-dence, it was in order that people within the community shouldtake up jobs so that development benefits the local residents[. . .] Many participants agreed that locals should be given prior-ity on unskilled and semi-skilled labor before looking elsewhere[and] the Mukumbi royal establishment would be given an

7 Kansanshi Fact Sheet. http://www.first-quantum.com/Theme/FirstQuantum/filesdoc_downloads/Kansanshi_April%20_2012-FINAL.pdf.

8 As noted, tribe is a patchwork of various chieftaincies in rural Zambia. The policyof affirmative action was for the Kaonde residents of three particular chiefsterritories. To the extent that it excluded Kaonde from outside the region, theemergent politics was not purely on tribal lines. But while not all Kaonde werebeneficiaries of the policy, all the beneficiaries were Kaonde, and certainly the non-Kaonde talked about it as Kaonde tribalism.

/

’

opportunity to intervene in labor recruitment as a control mea-sure to avert public out-cry’’ (Quoted in Mubambe, 2005).

Thus, as the local Kaonde became the beneficiary community, itwas logical that as the supposed representatives of their subjects,the chiefs too be enrolled in capital’s social development practices.Consequently, in the construction phase Lumwana employed thou-sands of unskilled workers—while also training many in certaintechnical tasks like operating trucks—who belonged to the threeKaonde chieftaincies. And the system placed the three chiefs asmediators: potential employees fulfilling the eligibility criterionof being ‘native’ to the three chieftaincies were to register withtheir respective chief and the lucky amongst had their name for-warded to Lumwana (Negi, 2010).

In this situation, the non-locals’—most of them from the Cop-perbelt—framing of their displeasure with the recruitment policyoperated through two means, first, as a critique of the Kaonde ascapable wage workers, particularly mineworkers; and second, byaccusing the Kaonde of tribalism. With regards to the former, con-sider the words of a recent migrant:

‘‘You want production, hence you need people who are edu-cated and have experience. . .Kaonde people are not. You cannotforce a Camel to drink water’’ (Personal interview, 29 March2008).

According to a local journalist a typical Kaonde is simply notinterested in working on the mines and that he likes to drink, pre-sumably relatively more than others. So when ‘‘you want to subjecthim to shifts of 0600 h to 1800 h, he feels his freedom has been ta-ken away’’ (Personal communication, 12 November 2007). Bright, arecent migrant from the Copperbelt had a similar line of reasoningwhen he said that despite ‘loafing’ around for over 3 months, hestill did not have a job. Meanwhile, the local Kaonde people foundemployment easily, even though ‘‘they don’t know anything aboutthe job. They are not like us from the Copperbelt’’ (Personal Com-munication, 11 March 2008). Yet another jobseeker—a second gen-eration Bemba in Solwezi—added that the Kaonde work a month ortwo until they have enough money to buy a bicycle and fertilizerbefore they run back to their villages, thereby making irresponsibleworkers (Personal communication, 20 October 2007). On one level,these statements reveal that many local Kaonde prefer farming forthe new market instead of working full time on the mines. Whatmakes this situation seem unjust to the non-Kaonde jobseekersis that the Kaonde have options other than minework, while they,being fully proletarianized, cannot find a job.

As for the second broad point of critique, and in a particularlyinsightful statement, Bright said the following:

‘‘You are a Zambian, you have a green registration card [foreign-ers in Zambia have a pink card], how can you segregate? We areZambians, ‘One Zambia, One Nation’. This mine is for all Zambi-ans. You think there are no Kaonde in Lusaka? Go to Chingola [atown in the Copperbelt Province], there are Kaonde at the mine-s. . .but here if you are from Copperbelt, different story’’(Personal communication, 11 March 2008).

The difference between Kaonde and outsiders’ claims then isthe scale at which they are framed: the former draw upon their po-sition as backward locals in need of benefits from the developmentbeing brought about by global capital, while the latter point to thepromise of equality latent in their national citizenship. However,the constitution of the local is not entirely straightforward. Onceagain, it is shot through by the logic of indirect rule and its ascrip-tion of rural territories to particular tribes. It is under these condi-tions that the localist demands here, to critics, become tribalistdemands. This allegation is provided further teeth because of theplace of the Kaonde chiefs as key mediators of capital and labor.

246 R. Negi / Geoforum 45 (2013) 240–247

Commenting on these developments, even Zambian PresidentMichael Sata recently ‘warned’ the chiefs from the region againsttribalism, adding that ‘‘they say they want to remove everybodywho is in North-Western Province and employ their own rela-tives. . .You can use tribe in your own house but [not] when youcome to national level’’ (quoted in Chanda, 2011).

It should be noted, however, that in regional history there havebeen instances of different sorts of localisms, which though are nottainted with allegations of tribalism. A variety has been in currencyin the Copperbelt Province (Larmer, 2007). Very briefly, it is theidea that despite fueling the larger economy and earning muchof the foreign exchange—copper is the predominant source of suchrevenues—, Copperbelt does not receive funds from the state inkeeping with its contribution, while also being underrepresentedin national politics. During periods of thriving economic activityin the Copperbelt that have accompanied past mining booms, thisargument assumes added force. Its emotive kernel is that the sur-plus generated there is viewed as disappearing into the coffers ofthe Lusaka-based state elite, who use it to grease their respectivepatronage links in various other regions of Zambia. Moreover, gi-ven the Bemba-domination of Copperbelt politics, its proponentshave also created alliances with Bemba heartland in NorthernProvince, acting thus as a key pressure group on the central state.Expressions of this politics have been seen at various moments inZambian history, including more recently in the rise of the PatrioticFront (PF). PF has successfully tapped into and fueled Copperbelt-centered populism, rallying the population around a platform thatspeaks of greater regional representation. In doing so, they havebuilt a strong support base in the Province, and have roundly de-feated the other major party—the Movement for MultipartyDemocracy (MMD)—in successive national elections there. Inter-estingly, and despite the fact that these Copperbelt-centered polit-ical currents have predominantly Bemba support, this politics isgenerally viewed as secular, and therefore, legitimate.

As stated above, the two commonly used meanings of tribalismrelate to the persistence of ethnic affiliation and as a pejorative todefine the traces of the countryside [tribal/traditional] in the urban[secular/modern]. As Chanock argues, those set to lose in the sup-posedly secular world of state and economy often cling to traditionas a rallying cry (Chanock, 1985). At the same time, one findsrepeated ‘‘pronouncements of the country’s public officials, news-paper editors, and civil society leaders, who regularly denounce‘tribalism’ as retrogressive and incompatible with national devel-opment’’ (Posner, 2005, p. 93). The assumption behind thisnegative use of tribalism is that politics around the tribe is neces-sarily in opposition to the secular nation state. I have alreadyshown that in Zambia, they co-exist. The persistence of chieftain-cies means that rural subjects continue to be viewed as essentiallytribal beings but their claims are supposed to be articulated in thevocabulary of the modern state. President Sata’s statement above istherefore to be interpreted in this light.

This contradiction is of an enduring nature because there seemsto be little consensus on political reform in the countryside. Capitalimplies mobility of various kinds, including that of labor seekingwork, or that has been enrolled in its circuits through a historyof more coercive mechanisms. Indirect rule though imposes fix-ity—since one’s tribal affiliation is a hereditary attribute—and de-spite being a second or more generation migrant, one perpetuallyremains a non-native in places other than one’s supposed home-land. This interplay of mobility/fixity means that there remainsthe possibility of being identified as an outsider and consequentlythe implicit threat of expulsion in changed political economic cir-cumstances. These are the kinds of latent tensions at the intersec-tion of capital and tribe that have exploded in other contexts andtherefore need to be recognized and debated with the goal ofaddressing historical inequities without lapsing into divisive bifur-

cations. With this background, both the tribal-logic of recruitmentand its critique framed around tribalism are ultimately problem-atic, for while the former effectively leads to tribal divisions inthe workplace, the latter fails to recognize the historical marginal-ization of places such as NWP.

5. Conclusion

The extraction-led economic boom currently underway in sev-eral African countries is hinged on the expansion of capital intoplaces hitherto at its margins. Many such frontier-spaces, includingSolwezi in North Western Zambia, are characterized by the contin-ued salience of the structures of indirect rule and legacies of colo-nial capitalism. Consequently, the overlaying of extractive capitalat this point in the geo-historical trajectory of Solwezi have givenrise to political contestations that pivot around the meaning andimbrications of tribe. It is in this manner, and despite academicand progressive critique of and disengagement with it, that tribehas reentered public discourse. Those who consider the miningboom in and around Solwezi to, first and foremost, contribute tothe development of the local community consider the SolweziKaonde to be the supposed beneficiaries. In keeping with ‘bestpractices’ in extractive industries one of the new copper minesimplemented an affirmative action employment policy thatreserved jobs for the Kaonde. This, however, attracted the displea-sure of those competing for work at the mines, whose counterargu-ment turned on allegations of tribalism, which is an invective of astrong kind in an aspirationally modern and secular nation-state. Itis argued here that with the persistence of the ‘colonial present’(Fraser, 2007) Zambians in the countryside are left with littlechoice in the matter but to be tribalist when framing their claims.This case also raises crucial questions related to the appropriatescale of the redistribution of benefits from resources—are all Zam-bians to have an equal stake, or should those ‘indigenous’ to min-ing reserves enjoy privileged access? As capital expands to othersimilar contexts, such matters are likely to become even moreimportant.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the Mershon Centerfor International Security Studies (Ohio State University), Founda-tion for Urban and Regional Studies (University of Essex), and theDepartment of Geography at Ohio State University. Thanks to theanonymous reviewers for their perceptive comments.

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