Industrial mining on the Central African Copperbelt attracted substantial, if transient, white populations from the outset, though these communities have been treated separately. Many thousands of white traders, prospectors, mineworkers, engineers, general itinerants and would-be settlers were attracted by the copper boom and often spent time…[Read more]

This article examines the changing forms of African agency in the context of contestations over natural resource governance with the European Union. The authors argue that EU policy is motivated by material self-interest but that it has not been able to successfully implement these policies. The way these policies have been challenged by African…[Read more]

This article explores the experiences of white workers on the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia during World War II. Much of the existing literature on the region focuses on African labour, yet the boom that began in the copper-mining industry also attracted thousands of mobile, transient European workers. These workers were part of a primarily…[Read more]

Who could be considered a legitimate representative of South Africa’s working class, and even who constituted this class, was bitterly contested during the twentieth century. This chapter examines the struggles for international recognition by the rival constituents of South Africa’s labour movement, which was sharply divided along racial and ide…[Read more]

Understandings of class have often been highly racialized and gendered. This article examines the efforts of white workers’ organizations in Southern Africa during the 1940s to forge such a class identity across the region and disseminate it among the international labor movement. For these organizations, the “real” working class was compo…[Read more]

This article examines industrial unrest and the restructuring of the workforce on the mines of the Zambian Copperbelt during the late 1950s. The mining workforce was highly stratified along lines of race and skill and attempts to alter occupational hierarchies by the mining companies provoked a lengthy strike by white mineworkers, the most…[Read more]

Following Zambia’s independence in 1964, several thousand non-Zambian Africans were identified and progressively removed from the Copperbelt mines as part of a state-driven policy of ‘Zambianisation’. Curiously, this process has been overlooked among the multitude of detailed studies on the mining industry and Zambianisation, which is usual…[Read more]

Today, Jack Hodgson is best-known as a tenacious anti-apartheid militant and for his role in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress. Details about his earlier life as a miner on the Rand and the Copperbelt are virtually unknown, and this helps explain why it has been assumed in the literature that Hodgson’s o…[Read more]

This article follows the fortunes of a group of riveters who moved, briefly, from the Clyde to the Copperbelt to work on construction at the newly opened copper mines in the region in 1930. Escaping from Depression-era Glasgow, these volatile riveters clashed with hard-bitten American mine managers over wages, self-respect and the colour bar in…[Read more]