Providing an innovative spatial analysis of Copperbelt towns, this chapter explains the uneven nature of formal and informal development of mine townships, non-mine municipal areas and informal settlements. The chapter explains how mine companies and states sought to manage the separate development of these areas and how residents came to understand and represent their distinctive nature but also their inter-related social and economic character. It explores segregation between and integration of mine and non-mine areas and how the correlation between employment and housing reinforced social divisions within African society. Through a focus on the mining towns of Likasi (DRC) and Mufulira (Zambia), it explains how housing shortages and the high cost of urban life drove many residents to informal settlements and to pursue economic activities that were incompatible with the conventional view of the Copperbelt’s urban ‘modernity’.

Chapter 5 focusses on the gendered history of the Copperbelt. It explains the centrality of female migration to the region, explores the roles imposed on women by companies and policy-makers as housewives and makers of ‘modern’ nuclear families and analyses the actual economic and social activity of women in Copperbelt society. The chapter shows how official anxiety about custom, marriage and female sexuality led to sustained social welfare intervention by mine companies and states. It equally demonstrates how African women and men themselves sought to make urban marriages and families and how they understood the changing nature of family life. The chapter explains how social historians highlighted the role of Zambian ‘women as workers’ and Congolese ‘women as wives’ and, using interviews, contrasts this to a sustained analysis of ‘women’s work’ encompassing housework, farming, trading and (occasionally) paid employment. Using interviews with community development officers, it also explains how post-independence mine companies managed familial and social conflict in mine townships and the understandings of family, production and custom that underwrote them.

Chapter 4 explores social and political organisation in the late colonial Copperbelt in the run-up to political independence in the early 1960s. It explains why social unrest was diagnosed in contrasting ways by states, companies and researchers in the Congo and Northern Rhodesia. While Belgium encouraged social stabilisation of urban family life, while denying meaningful ‘modern’ political reform, British policy-makers encouraged ‘responsible’ unionisation. The consequences of these different policies are explored with an examination of the African Mineworkers’ Union in Northern Rhodesia and the Indigenous Enterprise Councils in Haut-Katanga. The chapter also analyses ‘elite’ African political mobilisation and expression in both regions and how the frustration of their aspirations led them to engage in diverse forms of anti-colonial activism. It argues that, while the materialist politics of the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt placed it at the centre of a cosmopolitan Zambian nationalism, Haut-Katanga’s strategic minerals and ethnicised politics led to a chaotic decolonisation marked by its secession from newly independent Congo and to the military conflict and ethnic violence of the Congo crisis.

Chapter 6 explains the uneasy integration of the Copperbelt region into the two nation-states of DRC and Zambia. It explores how the Copperbelt border was given new political and moral meanings in official attempts to impose national identities on the region’s mobile communities. It shows how the centrality of Copperbelt mining wealth to projects of national development necessitated political control from distant capitals, generating conflict (in Zambia) with labour unions and fuelling political opposition, while (in Haut-Katanga) the secession was followed by military occupation and political rule by decree. The chapter explains the nationalisation of copper mining companies and the ways that ruling elites sought effective national control over mineral wealth and Copperbelt societies, but also the limits to this control. It also investigates the nationalisation/Africanisation of knowledge production about the Copperbelt in the region’s universities and among leading Zairian and Zambian intellectuals.

Chapter 7 analyses the history of Copperbelt cultures, focussing on the region’s music and visual art. While Copperbelt migrants expressed their understanding of social change through innovative, syncretic cultural mediums, cultural analysts and curators distinguished between ‘high’ and popular art, promoting artistic authenticity and criticising the supposed ‘Westernisation’ of local cultural expression. The chapter explores the role of Hugh Tracey’s International Library of African Music (ILAM) in curating, representing and promoting Copperbelt music and the curation and analysis of Haut-Katangese painting, both as ‘primitive art’ and as ‘popular painting’, and the ways artists engaged with these forms of knowledge production. It explains how the Zairian and Zambian states sought to produce new national cultures and the ways in which Copperbelt musicians and artists engaged with these initiatives. The chapter explores how social and economic change shaped the development of Copperbelt cultural outputs and how the region’s economic decline led to new innovations in cultural expression that give meaning to its marginalisation and crises, often in nostalgic forms.

This chapter re-examines and challenges the dominant view of the Copperbelt in the mid-to-late twentieth century as a place of booming economic growth, secure employment and steadily improving living standards. It instead shows that copper mining provided a relatively small number of skilled and well-paid jobs to its African residents, most of whom scraped a precarious living from low-paid work, trading and farming. The chapter also demonstrates that copper mining, notwithstanding the dominant idea of the Copperbelt as a modernising urban space, never provided a basis for wider industrialisation and economic development, before or after political independence. It explains how changing understandings of mine labour, skill and productivity shaped new ways of organising the workforce. Mine companies and late colonial states feared the impact of unemployment and sought unsuccessfully to control rural-to-urban migration. The chapter uses interviews to explore the diverse ways in which migrants sought a place in the city via a range of income-generating activities.

Through a history of the Central African Copperbelt in the first half of the twentieth century, this chapter sets the scene for subsequent analysis. It explains the similarities and differences in the early development of the Northern Rhodesian and Belgian Congolese Copperbelts, addressing labour migration and stabilisation, mine company and colonial state policies and the identification of the Copperbelt as a ‘modern’ urban region of Africa experiencing rapid social change and therefore in need of surveillance, intervention and research. The chapter then analyses the ideas and activities of Anglophone and Belgian research institutes and the ways their assumptions and approach framed understandings of the Copperbelt. It then examines the participation of African actors in these research and knowledge production processes and considers the ways in which Africans understood the nature of Copperbelt society in the mid-twentieth century.

In the mid-twentieth century, thousands of women moved from diverse communities across central Africa to new towns in an area historically associated with Lamba, Lunda and other societies, some of whom had produced valuable minerals there. These women, many joined by their husbands and families, engaged in a wide range of economic activities including subsistence and commercial farming but also informal trade and labour. Over the next decades – as their number swelled to tens and then hundreds of thousands – they built vibrant communities based on new forms of social, cultural and religious association and identities. They and their families had, however, to contend with repression and attempts at political domination by illegitimate authorities over which they lacked control, severe market fluctuations in the buying power of their customers and the environmental effects of their neighbours’ activities on their health, land and economic opportunities.

The book concludes with an analysis of its key themes and arguments. It provides a comparative explanation of the region’s historical development, emphasising the role of elite and popular knowledge production in its social history. It considers the ways in which this approach may be applied to social history more generally.

Chapter 9 provides an environmental history of the Copperbelt and the polluting effects of mining. It explains how mine companies’ control of land and official assumptions about urban society rendered the region’s widespread agricultural activities as illegitimate and ‘out of place’. It explains why many Copperbelt residents, particularly women, farmed, both as an everyday economic activity and, increasingly over time, as a response to hardship and economic crisis. It explores how pollution, particularly the poisoning of air and water with sulphur dioxide emissions, was ubiquitous yet ‘invisible’ in the minds of policy-makers, companies and – to a considerable extent – Copperbelt residents themselves. The chapter then explains how environmental impact assessment by companies, states and international and local NGOs raised local awareness of pollution, making it a central subject of community mobilisation in the early twentieth century, even as newly privatised mining companies ‘offshored’ responsibility for the legacy of historical pollution to poorly resourced states.

Chapter 8 focusses on the region’s recent history of sustained economic decline and political change and conflict. It explains the reasons for this crisis and the role of indebtedness, political corruption and the imposition of austerity and market-oriented policies in reducing living standards and necessitating the ‘reform’ of the mining industry and Copperbelt societies. The chapter explores the rising local opposition to both these policies and to political repression and the contrasting experiences of political change in the early 1990s, with Zambia transitioning to multi-party democracy while Congo was mired in profound social crisis and military conflict. It then explores the liberalisation of both economies and the privatisation of the mining industry, associated in the Copperbelt with the loss of formal-sector jobs, falling living standards and the loss of company social provision. The chapter uses interviews to explore local understandings of this period of decline and political change and how social scientists have explained this extended period of decline.