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It is sadly fitting, whilst I was in Zambia celebrating 60 years of Zambian independence[1] and attending a conference marking this event, the sad news reached me of the death of Andrew Dunlop Roberts on 16 October 2024.[2] Andrew Roberts was an autonomous and impeccable historian, whose books on Zambian history have more than stood the test of time and have come to determine the historiography of Zambia and African History as a whole.[3] Roberts, who completed his PhD in Madison with Jan Vansina on the history of the Bemba (primarily on the basis of extended fieldwork and extensive oral interviews), was a mild-mannered gentleman who was brutally honest in his academic work. As such, it is Roberts who left us with a truly succinct description on the establishment of Northern Rhodesia (later to become the Republic of Zambia), by noting that it was in effect, in his eloquent words:
…simply an awkwardly shaped piece of debris resulting from [Cecil John] Rhodes’s failure to obtain Katanga.[4]
Thus, in essence, Zambia is a country wrapped around the copper rich province Katanga of what is today Congo DRC. That Katanga eluded the grasp and aspirations of Cecil John Rhodes, was not for want of trying on Rhodes’ part.
The mining towns of Kimberley, Kabwe, Kambove and Tsumeb, were established as part of a single technopolitical project that was initiated in the 1880s within the British Empire that extended from the Cape to southern Congo and beyond. In the present, the restriction of academic research to the compartments of the borders of post-colonial African states obscures the interconnected transregional aspects of history. This was not always the case. From the 1880s onwards the British imperialist and mining magnate, Cecil John Rhodes, and the coterie that surrounded him, made their intentions abundantly clear. In the ongoing Scramble for Africa their intention was to colour the map Imperial Red, to “open” Africa to British commerce. Central to this endeavour was the “Cape to Cairo” railway and telegraph line. The seed money for this technopolitical project was generated through the controlled sale of diamonds mined in Kimberley, where the diamond mines had been amalgamated under the control of Cecil John Rhodes in 1884. Rhodes used this immense wealth to purchase the assent of the British and Cape Colonial parliaments. It was in this context that the British South Africa Company (BSAC) was founded by Rhodes. The company, with lavish financial incentives provided by Rhodes, obtained a royal charter to administer and govern colonial Zimbabwe and Zambia on behalf of the British Crown in 1889. Rhodes attempted to use the BSAC to gain access to Katanga, the heavily mineralised copper rich southern region of Congo. Indeed, Rhodes funded and sponsored two expeditions to Katanga. In the event, a rival expedition of mercenaries under the command of Captain William G. Stairs, operating on behalf of King Leopold II of Belgium, gained control of Katanga.
Although Rhodes was thwarted from gaining Katanga itself, he did acquire mining rights to this heavily mineralised copper rich region of Congo, through investments in Tanganyika Concessions Limited (TCL). Similarly, although Rhodes failed to gain control of South West Africa, what is today Namibia, he did obtain mining rights to substantial sections of the territory through extensive investments in the South West Africa Company (SWACO). SWACO was used to leverage funding on the London Stock Exchange for the Otavi Minen und Eisenbahn Gesellschaft (OMEG) that exploited the copper deposits in Tsumeb. In effect the investments of Rhodes in companies that were not operating within territories of the British Empire, be it Tanganyika Concessions Limited or the Otavi Minen und Eisenbahn Gesellschaft, foreshadowed the activities of contemporary trans-national corporations, and underscores the fluidity of capital investment in search of profit irrespective of state control.
I was deeply honoured to have been asked to present a paper at the conference entitled, “Forgotten Heroes of Zambia’s Independence Struggle”, organised by the Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula Foundation and the Southern African Institute for Policy and Research (SAIPAR)[5], and held at the Mulungushi International Conference Centre in Lusaka on 21 and 22 October 2024. The call for papers stated amongst other things:
Zambia’s political history is woven with stories of remarkable individuals who have left an indelible mark on the country’s liberation struggle. Many of these men and women who took great sacrifices, that included facing colonial repression, prison and even death have not been properly acknowledged; have been marginalised, under-recognized or simply forgotten by the writers of contemporary Zambian political history.
The call for papers concentrates on individual human beings. In the event, I submitted a paper that argued that, when looking at the independence struggle of Zambia, specific sites and locations are equally important, if not more important than individual human beings. In this instance I argued that the city of Kabwe, and more specifically the site of the Broken Hill lead and Zinc mine that operated between 1904 and 1994, was of crucial importance to the independence struggle in Zambia. Hitherto Kabwe has been largely ignored in favour of the Copperbelt. Yet, it was in Broken Hill (present day Kabwe) that the people of Zambia were first exposed to the ravages of racial-capitalism in the form of industrial mining in Zambia proper. At the same time, it was precisely this industrial mining that linked the people of Kabwe to what would become Zambia and the outside world.
Historiographically speaking the conference was an absolute success. One of the opening speakers was Bronagh Carr, the Irish Ambassador to Zambia; the Republic of Ireland being one of the main sponsors of the conference. Carr gave a stunning lecture that drew on the Republic of Ireland’s own independence struggle and reflected on the civil war that followed independence. Carr’s remarkably erudite lecture steered well clear of the patronising development twaddle often mouthed by the European diplomatic corps in Africa. Instead, quoting the Irish poet Eavan Bolland, the Ambassador focussed on how “the past is a place of whispers and disappearances, [whilst] history is the story of victors”. The Ambassador referred to historical theorists and poets and drew on Ireland’s own past as an example of a place where histories were obscured and hidden. In short, the past was not necessarily the triumphant and inevitable rise of the United Independence Party (UNIP) under the inspired leadership of Kenneth Kaunda. Instead, quoting Bolland, the past is “a place of shadows and whispers and failures and defeats”:
“I grew up in a time in Ireland when Irish history was made…In many ways that narrative was the story of a small country against a great one and was a story of heroes. But the past is a different place from history. The past, you know, consists of these shadows and whispers and lost names and no heroes. And increasingly it was the past that seemed to me the place where I would turn.”[6]
That the past was different from history was made abundantly clear on the first day through the testimony of a large number of “freedom fighters’, who in the past had fought for what they believed was valid and true, but had subsequently been sidelined by history.
In Lusaka I was also fortunate to have been invited to attend an event celebrating Zambian Independence that had been convened by Kobold a copper mining company investing in the country. The event, which was hosted at one of the capital’s luxury hotels, included an historical exhibition curated by Dr. Duncan Money and Dr. Marja Hinfelaar, as well as an art exhibition, a theatrical performance, and a panel discussion dealing with copper mining in Zambia.
Not surprisingly, the flights from Lusaka to Kimberley via Johannesburg were filled with mining personnel; big burly miners in working boots, engineers and technicians with rolled schematic diagrams in plastic tubes and squeaky clean helmets clipped to their rucksacks, junior self-important executives in shirts emblazoned with the logos of their respective mining companies, and several forms of corporate lawyers in tailor-made or off the rack dark suits in various stages of status and decline. Along with these, there was a smattering of safari-suited tourists, and gangly school pupils off to their respective boarding schools in ill-fitting school uniforms. Highlight of the flight from Lusaka to Johannesburg was a small cake decorated with the colours of Zambia and the numerals 60 celebrating the country's independence.
Coming in to land at Oliver Tambo International Airport at Johannesburg one could see extensive evidence of South Africa’s extractive mineral industry. Approaching Johannesburg we flew over an enormous slimes dam shaped like Africa that was truly astounding in size.
