The best-paid skilled jobs were reserved for white workers, who had organised themselves into a trade union and enforced a “colour bar”. The average white mineworker was paid almost ten times the average African mineworker in 1960.
Zambia’s Copperbelt has been a centre of the world copper industry for almost a century. When mining began on an industrial scale in the 1920s, the mines employed both migrant white and African workers. By the time of Zambia’s independence in 1964, around 7,500 white workers and 38,000 African workers were employed on the mines.
The solution was the creation of an “expatriate” category for white employees. This was explicitly a racial category. All African employees were designated as “local”, even if they had been born in Malawi or Tanzania. All white employees were designated “expatriates”, even if they had been born on the Copperbelt. The companies’ definition of expatriate was “skilled, white”.
Racial divides I have been researching the mining industry and, in particular, the Zambian Copperbelt. My main interests are in labour, race, the ways in which the mining industry connected seemingly disparate and distant places across the globe and the consequences that emanated from this. On the mines of Zambia’s Copperbelt it developed from deliberate corporate policy. Designating white employees as expatriates was the proposed solution to the spectre of rapidly rising wages.
Politically, the companies thought this would be a hard pill for the government to swallow. The United National Independence Party was officially multiracial and white Zambians had played a prominent role in the independence struggle.
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