There Used To Be Order Life on the Copperbelt after the privatisation of the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines A thesis submitted for the Degree of DoctorTown of Social Anthropology Cape of Patience Ntelamo Mususa Social Anthropology Department of African and Gender Studies, UniversityAnthropology and Linguistics University of Cape Town February 2014 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University Abstract The thesis examines what happened to the texture of place and the experience of life on a Zambian Copperbelt town when the state-owned mine, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) was privatized beginning 1997 following the implementation of structural adjustment policies that introduced free market policies and drastically reduced social welfare. The Copperbelt has long been a locus for innovative research on urbanisation in Africa. My study, unusual in the ethnographic corpus in its examination of middle-income decline, directs us to thinking of the Copperbelt not only as an extractive locale for copper whose activities are affected by the market, but also as a place where the residents’ engagement with the reality of losing jobs and struggling to earn a living after the withdrawal of mine welfare is re-texturing simultaneously both the material and social character of the place. It builds on an established anthropological engagement with the region that began with the Manchester school. This had done much to develop a theoretical approach to social change. The dissertation contributes to this literature by reflecting on how landscape and the art of living are interwoven and co-produce possibilities that, owing to both historical contingencies (for example, market fluctuations) and social formation (the kinds of networks and relationships to which one has access, positions in a nascent class structure and access to material means) make certain forms of inhabiting the world (im) possible, (un) successful for oneself and others. Ethnographic fieldwork using qualitative research methods was conducted over a two-year period between 2007 and 2009 with a core of close informant relationships from which a wider network was established. This was complemented by two quantitative neighbourhood surveys to measure the scale of observable phenomena. The author makes a case for an anthropology of “trying”, an expression often made in response by Copperbelt residents to how they are getting on. It is one that indicates an improvised life and offers an analytical approach to exploring the back-story to the residents’ observation that in the (ZCCM) past there used to be order. iii! Table of Contents Acknowledgements List of Figures - ix - Introduction “There used to be order” Life on the Copperbelt after the privatisation of the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines - 1 - Chapter One Mining, Welfare and Urbanisation: The Wavering Urban Character of Zambia’s Copperbelt - 21 - Chapter Two “You Can’t Plan”: Dreams, practice and order - 49 - Chapter Three “Getting by”: ‘Improvising a life’ on the Copperbelt after the privatisation of the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines - 89 - Chapter Four Contesting Illegality: Women in the informal copper business on the Zambian Copperbelt - 123 - Chapter Five Performing gender on the Copperbelt - 153 - Chapter Six “Topping Up”: Life Amidst Hardship and Death on the Copperbelt - 205 - Conclusion Making life out of disorder - 229 - Bibliography - 239 - v! Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the National Research Foundation of South Africa who have supported my study through a Wadsworth African Fellowship and NRF supervisor attached grant (Grant No 63222, F. Ross, grantholder Ethnographies of the Marginal) respectively. The study does not necessarily reflect the views of either the Wenner Gren Foundation or the NRF. I am thankful for the institutional support provided by the University of Cape Town, which has hosted my studies, and the Copperbelt University where I had previously worked. I especially thank my supervisor Professor Fiona Ross who has provided insightful feedback on the thesis and has been a patient stalwart throughout my study. The engagement and support of other scholars on the region has been important to me, in particular Miles Larmer and Alastair Fraser. I would like to extend by heartfelt gratitude to the residents of the Copperbelt, in particular Luanshya, who participated in my study and shared their life stories and offered friendship and support, in particular the Tembo and Nyati families. I am especially grateful to Kapepa Hendrick, Kasonde Mwenda, David Chola and Emmanuel Kamuna, my former students from the Copperbelt University’s School of Built Environment, who worked as my research assistants. I am grateful for the friendship of Xoliswa Kayumba, Sue Cavanna, Susan Hunter, Paul Physick, Mwansa and Finzi Saidi, and Brian and Liz Baldwin who offered in one way or another their support towards the completion of the thesis. The love and encouragement of my family has been especially important; my parents Joseph and Maureen to whom I dedicate this thesis; my brothers Tabuli, Mulemwa and Mufalo with whom I share numerous childhood memories of the Copperbelt, and my husband Vito Laterza who has been a lively and engaged academic critic. vii! List of figures Figure 1: Map of Zambia Figure 2: House front yard with maize stalks Figure 3: Pot holed road partially filled in with flux stone Figure 4: Luanshya recreation centre Figure 5: Street lined with heaps of flux stone from near by mine dumpsite Figure 6: Mayadi versus Komboni wife Figure 7: Young women at small front yard store in Luanshya ix! ! Introduction ‘There used to be order’: Life on the Copperbelt after the privatisation of the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines The sale of the Zambian state-owned mining conglomerate, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM), in the mid 1990s left a majority of mine town residents anxious about making a living and sustaining life. In the formerly middle-class suburban area that is the focus of my study, residents dug wells in their backyard for water and cut trees that lined the streets to fire bricks moulded from the clay of anthills that dot the landscape. They also planted crops in their backyard and in the open spaces of the parks and golf club lawns. In the dissertation, I explore people’s experiences of the texture of place and the shaping of life on a Zambian Copperbelt town following this sale, part of the widespread implementation of structural adjustment policies that introduced free market policies1 and drastically reduced social welfare in Zambia. The study, which focuses on a low-density former mine suburb in the Copperbelt town of Luanshya, where I lived in the years 2007 to 2010, demonstrates how this transformation has influenced the urban character of the mine town; how its inhabitants seek a livelihood in very trying times; how they enskill themselves; negotiate the moral and spatial boundaries of the free market; and make sense of their lives and change. Copperbelt residents say that in their recent past “there used to be order”, whereas the present is characterised by uncertainty and incoherence. The thesis describes how they navigate this present to “get by” and “get on with life”. I use an exploratory ontology that values trying as a way to open up possibilities, even in the likelihood of encountering impossibilities. 1 In 1991, after its first multiparty elections since it had become a one-party state in 1972, Zambia adopted full-scale free-market policies. 1! My work departs from previous ethnographies on the Copperbelt that, although they have done much to highlight the social and political situation, have paid less attention to describing how its inhabitants engage with it as a place. By drawing on theoretical and methodological perspectives in anthropology that emphasise performance and movement, I attempt to break from the systemic representations of the Copperbelt that do not account for the effort, experimental action, poetic and textural engagement with place and authority of everyday life in constrained circumstances. The Copperbelt as place To open, an extract from my journal. Walking in the early morning, on the streets of the Copperbelt town, Luanshya, I get fleeting moments of the same buoyancy I felt as a child walking down the roads of the Copperbelt. It had rained in the night, the light is soft and the air is fresh. I watch the children emerge from their homes, heading to school in their school uniforms. They seem so pensive. I watch them, they watch me, and I dodge the potholes full of water. I cross to the other side of the road, away from the house with the manhole that spews sewerage onto the road. I approach the house with the lovely garden and the only reasonable stretch of flamboyant trees on the road. I walk past it. On these walks, I go past the shiny new little metal Coca Cola shop selling bread and cell phone talk-time. The shop is in front of a house painted with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons; I think it also serves as a nursery school. I walk past another little shop, a wood off-cut cabin with a vividly and naively painted side profile of a man with a ‘table’ cut. It is a barber shop located near the road and outside a house shaded by mango trees. There is a stretch of the walk I do not like, and that I particularly dislike at midday when the hot sun beats on my head.