Copper, Borders and Nation-Building
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Copper, Borders and Nation-building Copper, Borders and Nation-building The Kantagese Factor in Zambian Political and Economic History Enid Guene African Studies Centre Leiden African Studies Collection, vol. 67 African Studies Centre Leiden P.O. Box 9555 2300 RB Leiden The Netherlands [email protected] www.ascleiden.nl Cover design: Heike Slingerland Cover photos: A coke oven is emptied, Lubumbashi, 1919. Photo E. Gourdine, collection Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) Tervuren; scene from inside the “Prince Léopold” copper mine in Kipushi. This was the only entire- ly subterranean exploitation of the Congo. Photo UMHK, collection RMCA, Tervuren Copyright photos: Collection Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren: Excava- tions Pierre de Maret: fig. 2.1, fig. 2.3 (1975 ); Excavations Pierre de Maret: fig. 2.2, fig. 2.4 (1974); photo UMHK: fig. 4.1 (1920), fig. 4.2 (1929), fig. 4.3 (1928); photo E. Leplae: fig. 4.4, fig. 4.5, fig. 4.6, fig. 4.9 (1912); photo G.F. de Witte: fig. 4.7 (1931); photo C. Lamote (Inforcongo): fig. 4.8 ( 1950); photo J. Makula (Inforcongo): fig. 5.1 (1960); photo Lambert (Inforcongo): fig. 5.2 (1959) Maps: Nel de Vink (DeVink Mapdesign) Layout: Sjoukje Rienks, Amsterdam Printed by Ipskamp Printing, Enschede ISSN: 1876-018x ISBN: 978-90-5448-158-4 © Enid Guene, 2017 Table of Contents 1 Introduction – Two Copperbelts, Two Histories? 7 1.1 A Joint History 7 1.2 ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Paradigms for the Copperbelt 11 1.2.1 Modernism and its Failure 11 1.2.2 Nation-Statism and Transnationalism 14 1.3 Objectives 17 2 The Setting 19 2.1 The Archaeological Evidence 21 2.2 The Luba and Lunda According to Oral Tradition 25 2.2.1 The Birth of the Luba and Lunda ‘Empires’ 25 2.2.2 Migrations of Lunda Groups 28 2.2.3 The Eighteenth Century: Two Migratory Thrusts 30 2.3 The Socio-Political Organisation 31 2.4 The Importance of Trade Networks 35 2.4.1 Pre-Long-Distance Trade in Central Africa 36 2.4.2 Long-Distance Trade in Central Africa 37 2.4.3 Trade as Catalyst for Cultural and Political Expansion 38 2.5 The Disintegration of the Central African States (1840-1900) 39 2.5.1 In the West: The Cokwe 40 2.5.2 In the East: The Yeke 40 2.5.3 Disrupted and Yet Never so Interconnected 42 Conclusion 44 3 The Division 47 3.1 The Scramble 48 3.2 The Demarcation of the Border 52 3.2.1 The 1894 Agreement 53 3.2.2 The First Anglo-Belgian Boundary Commission (1911-1914) 55 3.2.3 The Second Anglo-Belgian Boundary Commission (1927-1933) 57 3.2.4 Continuing Bickering 60 3.3 Local Attitudes to the Border 63 3.3.1 Early Developments 63 3.3.2 Protest Migrations 68 Conclusion 73 4 The Copper Industry 77 4.1 The Katangese Copperbelt: A Joint Enterprise 79 4.1.1 Northern Rhodesian Disenchantment and Katangese ‘El Dorado’ 79 4.1.2 British Interests at the Heart of Katangese Economics 82 4.2 Labour Migrations in the Early Twentieth Century (1910-1940) 87 4.2.1 A Rhodesian Workforce for Katanga (1910-1925) 87 4.2.2 The Rise of the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt (1924-1931) 92 4.2.3 The Change in the Direction of Labour Migration (1931-1940) 99 4.3 Agriculture, Fishery and Markets 104 4.3.1 Feeding Katanga: An Alternative to Migrant Labour 104 4.3.2 A Vibrant Sub-Economic Culture: The Market 111 Conclusion 115 5 The Politics 117 5.1 The Rise of Nationalism 119 5.1.1 The Strikes of 1935 and 1940 119 5.1.2 Trade Unions and Political Parties 125 5.2 The Katanga Secession (1960-1963) 130 5.2.1 Welensky and Katanga: Fighting for White Rule in Africa 134 5.2.2 The ANC and Katanga: An Opportunistic Affiliation 141 5.3 The Rise of the One-Party-State 152 5.3.1 Disappointed Expectations of Independence 152 5.3.2 The Final Showdown 157 Conclusion 159 6 Conclusion – Copper, Migration and Politics 163 6.1 Cross-border Identities and Political Development 163 6.2 The Copperbelt and ‘Nation-Statism’ 167 6.3 Border Conflicts in the Later Twentieth Century 169 Bibliography 173 1 Introduction Two Copperbelts, Two Histories? The Copperbelt is a geological zone known for its copper deposits and as- sociated mining and industrial development. This comparatively small strip of land – some 450 km long and 260 km wide – has, for about a century, formed the economic backbone of the two countries that host it: the Repub- lic of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet, there exists no integrated history of the Copperbelt, its distribution over two countries creating an artificial division in the eyes of many observers. This tendency to see the Copperbelt as not one but two entities, Luise White contends, has to do with two factors: a ‘disinclination to mix the history of Francophone and Anglophone regions’ and the fact that ‘the two histories do not provide a good chronological or comparative fit’ (White 2000: 274). As a result, distinct academic traditions, one English-speaking and the other French-speaking, have had the tendency to occult the actual interplay that existed between the Zambian and Katangese Copperbelts. This interplay is what the present nar- rative proposes to investigate. 1.1 A Joint History Even at first glance, it is apparent that, despite their separateness, there are many similarities in the histories of the two Copperbelts. Crucially, both be- came major economic hubs, though it happened earlier in the case of the Congolese Copperbelt. By the early 1960s, Katanga – the Congolese province in which the Copperbelt is located – accounted for about 8 per cent of the world’s total supply (Le Katanga économique 1961: 15) and Katanga’s larg- est company, the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), ranked third among the world’s copper producers.1 Zambia, far from falling wide of the mark, was leading copper supplier with an annual output of 633,000 tons 1 The UMHK was also the world’s largest producer of uranium and one of the world’s biggest producers of cobalt, exporting more than 60 per cent of the world’s supply in 1960. See Hemp- stone (1962: 53); Gérard-Libois & Verhaegen (1961: 223). 7 valued at £164,300,000 at the time of its independence in 1964 (Parpart 1983: 22). A second key similarity, related to the first one, is the fact that both Ka- tanga and Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia was known before independence) started their ‘careers’ as colonial territories as the property of companies rather than a colonial state. When Leopold II of Belgium grabbed for him- self a territory eighty times larger than his own country, he did not have the means to administer it, let alone develop it. He consequently entrusted the administration of Katanga to the Compagnie du Katanga on 15 April 1891. Until 1910, it was under the aegis of this company that the initial stages of the development of the Katangese mining industry were overseen.2 In practice, this lack of state control resulted in a semi-official, semi-autonomous status, which endured even after Katanga became the responsibility of the Belgian state in 1910. Until 1933, the administration of Katanga was entrusted to a Vice Governor General (Lemarchand 1962: 409), which allowed Katanga to function as a company territory practically independent from the rest of Bel- gian Congo. As for Northern Rhodesia, it took until 1924 for it to come under the control of the Colonial Office. Prior to this, the all-powerful British South Africa Company (BSAC) oversaw the Province’s administration and the de- velopment of its mining potential. Local officials were appointed either at the BSAC’s recommendation or by the BSAC directly, which means the colonial Secretary of State had limited influence in Northern Rhodesia. (Phiri 2006: 10). Finally, also largely thanks to the mining industry and its recruitment policies, both Copperbelts became the home of a ‘cosmopolitan’ communi- ty. By the 1930s, Copperbelt towns in Katanga and Northern Rhodesia were fast-developing towns bringing together workers from all over central Africa and there was increasing talk of African ‘urbanisation’ and ‘detribalisation’. At the same time, a comparatively large community of independent-minded white settlers also developed on both sides of the border. Although the Ka- tanga was the least populated area of the Congo at the time, it claimed 31 per cent of the total European population of the Congo in 1956.3 As for Northern Rhodesia, although it was not originally expected to become a settler colony, the development of the Copperbelt attracted more and more white migrants (many of whom came from South Africa) reaching a total of 65,277 in 1956 (Phiri 2006: 12). The significance of such overwhelming concentrations of economic and human resources, all of which can be traced to the presence of copper, cannot be underestimated. They had profound political implications for both Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 2 Congo Bulletin, 1906, FO 367/1/427. 3 Which represented a population of 34,047. See Lemarchand (1962: 406). 8 Copper was the determining factor in the division of the Copperbelt. The fact that that area of central Africa was copper-rich was well known long before the first European adventurers set foot in it. Copper had been mined for hun- dreds of years by local African societies and was probably at the root of the appearance of major centralised societies, most notably the Luba and Lunda empires, which exported copper via Portuguese traders to the Atlantic coast (Cornevin 1993: 224).