Abstract
This book is based on a doctoral dissertation entitled ‘“No Matter How Much or How Little They've Got, They Can't Settle Down”: A Social History of Europeans on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1926–74’, which was accepted by the University of Oxford in 2016. The book, as published, is not so much a social as a political and economic history of a group that never numbered many more than 7,000, reaching a peak in 1962, but which had considerable economic and political power for about 30 years.
As Harold Macmillan, then parliamentary secretary to the Colonial Office, told Arthur Creech-Jones, a Labour spokesman on colonial affairs, at a critical point in the Second World War in May 1942: ‘As long as we must have copper, we are in the hands of the Mine Workers’ Union’ (p. 85). This allowed the Northern Rhodesian Mine Workers’ Union to use its control of the production of a vital strategic commodity, strike action, and the threat of strike action in concert with white mine workers on the Congo side of the Copperbelt, to extract recognition of the ‘closed shop’ from the mining companies Rhodesian Selection Trust and Anglo American, with the tacit acquiescence of the British government in London. This safeguarded the skilled jobs done by daily paid workers for its exclusively white members until the eve of independence in the 1960s. Although it had tried, the South African Mine Workers Union had been unable to extend its activities to Northern Rhodesia, and there was no legislative industrial colour bar. But the Northern Rhodesian Mine Workers Union, which was established in 1936, was a highly effective organization. It secured what Duncan Money describes as a ‘de facto colour bar’ in 1941–2 (p. 98). In what is the major theme of the book, he points out that white mineworkers in Northern Rhodesia were noted from the 1930s onwards for their militancy and their high wages – and that these phenomena were interdependent.
Money shows that the white mineworkers were members of a transnational and highly mobile group of workers – his ‘class of their own’. Although most of them were English-speaking people who had passed through South Africa and who returned there, many of the leaders were radicals who had gained experience in union organizations in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. They included communists such as Jack Hodgson, who was excluded from Northern Rhodesia in 1940 and enlisted for war service in the army. As a member of the South African Communist Party after the war, he used his military skills (and possibly his knowledge of mining explosives) to instruct the first recruits to the African National Congress's Umkhonto we Sizwe in bomb-making in 1961. They also included Frank Maybank, a communist veteran of the Australian mines who, as general secretary of the union, was imprisoned and deported to the United Kingdom in 1942. He was allowed to return before the end of the war in 1945 and served as general secretary for another eight years. It must be said that their radicalism, even communism, did not always preclude racism as they fought to defend their workers against the probable ambition of capital to replace their members with cheaper black workers.
Money emphasises that this was a highly mobile workforce, with annual labour turnover as high as 35 per cent on the outbreak of war in 1939, 36 per cent following a failed strike in 1958, and a usual turnover of 15–20 per cent. Although the first president of the union, Victor Solomon Diamond, was the son of a Jewish pioneer in Northern Rhodesia, and members of some prominent families, such as the Purvises – Jack, Jim, and John – stayed on the mines for several generations, the miners did not generally see themselves as settlers. Consequently, they did not mount serious resistance to the erosion of the colour bar or to decolonization in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Given that there was no large settler-farming group in Northern Rhodesia, this explains the relatively easy transition to independence in Zambia by comparison with Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, though the related fact that Northern Rhodesia had never been granted settler self-government was also an important point of difference. It was never really seen by the colonial power as ‘a white man's country’.
There were still more than 4,000 white mineworkers on the Copperbelt in 1974, Money's terminal date. They had by then been reclassified as ‘expatriates’ and continued to enjoy high wages. Their status had improved in so far as they were no longer daily-paid workers who could be fired at 24 hours’ notice, but worked on monthly terms, and they also had privileges in relation to ‘home’ leave and access to foreign exchange for their gratuities. Their union was banned in 1969 and their numbers declined steadily following nationalization, the collapse of the copper price, and the near collapse of the mining industry in the 1980s and 1990s. There was a resurgence of the ‘expatriate’ workforce following the privatization of the mines, the recovery of the copper price, and the development of the ‘new Copperbelt’ in North-Western Province in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. By then, with the arrival of skilled workers from all over the world, the status of ‘expatriate’ was no longer racially defined as it had been in the 1960s and 1970s. It was no longer a synonym for ‘white’.
Duncan Money has drawn on a wide range of archival sources in Zambia, South Africa, and the United States, a relatively small number of interviews with surviving miners and family members, and a thorough combing of the secondary literature, to produce a highly competent study that fills a major gap. He does shed light on the relationship, sometimes antagonistic and sometimes cooperative, between the Northern Rhodesian Mine Workers Union and the African Mine Workers Union, which was established with the encouragement of the postwar Labour government in 1946. He could perhaps have said a little more about the African Mine Workers Union and its role as a source of opposition to the major nationalist party, the United National Independence Party (UNIP), both before and after independence. It participated in the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy and contributed to the end of the one-party state in 1990. Was militancy a tradition that was passed between unions across the racial divide?