Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. The statistics tell much of the story.
Copper provides most of the explanation.
Over this period copper has lost about two thirds of its purchasing power, and Zambia has lost half its productive capacity. Since even a mono-export economy cannot shrink at such a dramatic rate, the shortfall was made up by increasing external debt which of course simply prolonged the agony of making the inevitable adjustment to the new realities of the international financial system. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s the Copperbelt represented the dramatic intrusion of modernity with all its hopes and aspirations for material and social betterment, now that period is regarded with nostalgia as real living standards plummet with no prospect for change. It shifted the focus of the field away from a static, functionalist conception of a self-contained tribe, to the dynamic processes of incorporation into a global capitalist system through migration and urbanisation driven primarily through the mining industry. Colonial regimes found the tribalist view of African miners convenient since it served as the basis of a social policy which denied them adequate housing and other services on the grounds that they were merely temporary sojourners in urban areas.