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]

Liberation radios, the propaganda stations operated by the anti-Apartheid and anticolonial movements Southern Africa, provide us with a unique lens on the relationship between broadcasters and their audiences. Most importantly, they conceptualized audiences in a specific, two-pronged way to mobilize target populations and influence global media…[Read more]

The chapter presents a comparative history of two African cities notorious for the way their informal transport systems are regulated by different actors. It looks at how small private (often unlicensed) transport operators took over public transport in the 1950s and 1960s, their efforts at self-regulating and the efforts of informal workers to…[Read more]

Many analyses of media in Africa and elsewhere have emphasized the change in the relation between producers and consumers of media content that new media such as mobile telephony and the internet apparently have instigated (Lister et al. 2009; Ekine 2010).1 Whereas in ‘old’ (mass) media the two areas were clearly separated and producers det…[Read more]

This article traces the history of a group of Zambian broadcasters who established the first radio station in the country and made their mark on broadcasting for years to come. It describes their contribution to modern Zambian culture and to nationalist mobilisation. African broadcasters developed formats, ways of presenting and music that…[Read more]