Miles Larmer

Reaction & Resistance to Neo-liberalism in Zambia

This paper explores the current Zambian discourse around neo-liberal economic polices, in particular its expression in a trade union-led campaign against the privatisation of the Zambian National Commercial Bank (ZNCB). It locates the origin of these protests in the impact of economic liberalisation programmes implemented by the ruling Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) since 1991. The paper studies the privatisation of the economically strategic copper mining industry and, taking as a case study the mining town of Luanshya, explores the linkages between a secretive and corrupt privatisation process, and its human consequences for mineworkers, their families and communities. It finds that the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) sought to implement privatisation regardless of legal requirements, social consequences, and the future sustainability of the mining industry. It surveys the development of opposition to privatisation amongst civil society organisations, particularly trade unions, and seeks to identify emerging Zambian alternatives to neo-liberalism, including new models of popular control of strategic economic resources, and a renewed authoritarian nationalism that feeds on popular resentment of the effects of neo-liberal policies.

Neither war nor peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): profiting and coping amid violence and disorder

This Special Issue of the Review of African Political Economy appears a decade since a landmark double issue of the journal was published in 2002. In addressing the then apparent resolution of the second Congo war, ROAPE’s editors stressed the difficulties of resolving the complex and interrelated problems linking the conflict to political and economic issues, the national and international context, and ‘issues of identity, ethnicity and nationality’ (Trefon et al. 2002). A decade on, the DRC is experiencing an absence of both outright war and a lasting peace. Periodic outbreaks of fighting, as with the M23 occupation of Goma and other parts of North Kivu in November 2012, have led to the deaths of soldiers and civilians and to the further displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The DRC has made a limited recovery from the worst aspects of its recent conflicts, but few if any of the underlying problems have been resolved in the last decade and the complexity of doing so has not significantly diminished. In this context, this Special Issue focuses less than its predecessor on national and international political issues – although the Briefing by Theodore Trefon provides significant insight into this area. Instead, it seeks to show the ways in which some Congolese people, particularly in the east of the country, find strategies to survive, cope and in some cases even to profit from, the liminal socio-political environment in which they find themselves. This, we believe, provides a compelling sense of the political economy of ‘post-war’ DRC from the perspective of those who experience it first-hand. The articles in this issue analyse the social transformations occasioned by more than 15 years of continuing political and social violence in the DRC. These conflicts do not have a singular logic, but result from multiple local conflicts, as well as outside interventions. The violence associated with the Congo wars has caused social upheavals throughout the country, but particularly in central and eastern regions. These wars occurred in a context of a collapsed state and of a society plagued by widespread poverty, which amplified their impact. Although many existing social arrangements have been thrown into total disarray, a perhaps surprising range of new social institutions and patterns have also arisen. The articles in the Special Issue explore some of the ways in which major institutions and patterns of Congolese society have been transformed by the wars, and how new models of political engagement, economic activity and social interaction continue to evolve. This editorial will provide a limited introduction to the historical and contemporary context for these articles, explaining the valuable contribution each makes to our understanding of the DRC in relation to this context.

Social movement struggles in Africa

This special issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) arose from a conference held in Paris in January 2010, organised by three of the issues co-editors: Richard Banegas, Marie-Emm...

Ethnopopulism in Africa: opposition mobilization in diverse and unequal societies

At first glance, ethnically based and populist forms of mobilization appear to be contradictory and ultimately mutually exclusive phenomena. Appealing to voters on the basis of a shared sense of economic grievance against powerful or wealthy sections of society does not fit well with the emphasis on sectional divisions that is required to rally support on the basis of ethnicity or region. Yet over the past ten years a number of opposition political parties in Africa have risen to prominence by fusing populist and ethnic constituencies, a form of political mobilization we call “ethnopopulism”. This article employs a pairwise comparison of Kenya and Zambia to explain how leaders have been able to harness this apparently incompatible combination to considerable electoral effect. We argue that in order to fully overcome the tensions at the heart of ethnopopulism leaders need to identify and incorporate shared narratives of exclusion felt by different communal and interest groups. But we also show that the narratives available to political entrepreneurs are shaped both by the structure of society and the ideas and networks left over from past episodes of political mobilization. Finally, we argue that variation in the reach of the urban political economy and the extent to which ethnic identities have historically been politicized shape the potential for populist mobilization to overcome ethnic divisions, and hence challenge prevailing patterns of “ethnic politics”.

Historical Perspectives on Zambia’s Mining Booms and Busts

What will be the long-term consequences on the political economy of Zambia of the short-lived boom in the prices of copper and cobalt, which lasted approximately five years from 2004 until 2008? For the majority of the youthful Zambian population, the boom was their first experience of a period when the mining industry, regarded as strategic to the national economy, operated as a potential benefit and not a burden. Until around 2004, Zambia had experienced almost 30 years during which its profound economic dependency on the mining industry came to be perceived as a major cause of its economic decline. During this period Zambia went from being one of Africa’s richest countries, with visions of becoming a “modern,” “developed” country—as illustrated in the work of James Ferguson—to one of the continent’s poorest and most indebted countries.1 The recent mining boom appeared to represent a clear break from this period, generating new and challenging questions for analysts, politicians, civil society organizations, and, most importantly, ordinary Zambians. With the onset of the current global economic crisis, it is as yet unclear whether Zambia is any better placed to cope with wild fluctuations in copper prices than it has proven to be in earlier periods. In a national economy dominated by a single product, the price of which is prone to drastic fluctuations, the question that has consistently arisen is how to ensure short-term profits made in the mining industry are converted into long-term benefits for Zambians themselves.

Local conflicts in a transnational war: the Katangese gendarmes and the Shaba wars of 1977–78

In analysing the Shaba wars of 1977–78, in which Angola-based Katangese rebels invaded and destabilised Zaire, this article analyses the complex interaction between local forces, national states and the wider Cold War in Africa. As well as a case study of the National Front for the Liberation of Congo (FLNC) which carried out these invasions, the article seeks to provide new understanding of the ways in which both contemporaneous Cold War protagonists and subsequent historians have often failed to understand the underlying motivations of local forces which fought in conflicts that existed in problematic relationship to the wider Cold War.

‘More Fire’ Next Time? The Southern African Social Forum as a Locus of Social Protest, 2003-2005

Have the Social Forums that have taken place in southern Africa between 2003 and 2005 provided a useful forum for the regions social movements to improve their understanding of, and response to, the impact of global neo-liberal capitalism? The global Social Forum movement remains biased towards Western activists and agendas. Interviews with participants in southern African Social Forums, suggest that while the influence of Africans on the global social justice movement remains limited, southern African social movements are utilizing the Social Forum model to strengthen their own struggles.

Permanent precarity : capital and labour in the Central African copperbelt

Abstract This article provides a new history of mine capital and labour in the ‘Central African Copperbelt’ – the cross-border mining region of the Zambian copperbelt and Haut Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It doing so, it seeks to overcome the limitations of earlier structurally minded analysis rooted in modernist notions regarding the transformative capacity of mining capital and a ‘new’ African working class. Building on post-structuralist challenges to such assumptions, the article demonstrates the precarity, unevenness and uncertainty of the actually existing copperbelt economy and society. The comparison of the two copperbelt regions enables consideration of differential outcomes as a way of rethinking apparent inevitabilities. Analysis of how ideas about these mining societies were generated and circulated helps explain how dominant ways of understanding copperbelt capital and labour relations became established and continue to inform nostalgia for a ‘golden age’ of mining-fuelled prosperity at odds with historical reality.

Introduction: Narratives of Nationhood

This special issue of JSAS has its origins in a major conference held in Lusaka in September 2012, titled ‘Zambia 2014: Narratives of Nationhood’, organised in anticipation of this year’s fiftieth anniversary of the country’s independence. This was an extraordinarily rich and vibrant event, bringing together dozens of scholars from a wide range of disciplines, together with practitioners in fields such as health care and literature, all of whom contributed to stimulating debates about Zambia’s own recent history and how this should be understood in the context of regional and international change in the last 50 years. The quality of the articles on Zambian literature and radio broadcasting was such that a group of these has already been published, in JSAS 40.3. The conference, however, despite the best efforts of its organisers – the editors of this special issue – unavoidably reflected the inequalities and unevenness of the academic and wider milieu in which it was produced. There is, as a result, a relative paucity of Zambian contributors to this special issue, a problem that is reflected in international journals more generally. The contemporary weakness of the higher education sector in Zambia in general, and at the University of Zambia in particular, are explored in the concluding section of this editorial. The wider challenge of presenting recent research on Zambian society is to provide some kind of coherent, intelligible research agenda while simultaneously avoiding the reduction of the history of a national territory such as Zambia to a necessarily limited set of themes that have attracted the attention of researchers. Historians of Africa in particular face the challenge of writing history, especially political history, that doesn’t construct or contribute to a narrative that – for the pre-1964 period – may read like a dress rehearsal for national independence and (for the post-1964 period) as a series of ripples that echo the achievements (or lack of achievements) of the independence event and the expectations that surrounded it. Here we seek to square this particular circle by reflecting on a set of core themes in Zambian scholarly literature that have been revisited and reassessed by the contributions to this special issue, while suggesting ways in which research in these areas may be further enriched in the future.

Rethinking the Katangese secession

This article, in analysing the Katangese secession of 1960–63, argues that it should be primarily understood not simply as the result of external machinations but, at least as importantly, as the initiative of indigenous Katangese political leaders. It charts the development of the Katangese national project among self-consciously ‘indigenous’ Katangese leaders, who responded to what they saw as an imposed and illegitimate Congolese nation-state by constructing a national imagery rooted in a mythico-historical reconstruction of a usable Katangese past. The article explains how this was utilised by the Katangese state during the secession to perform an ‘authentic’ Katangese national identity. In so doing, the article draws attention to the parallels between the Katangese nation-state project and attempts by post-colonial states to perform nationhood elsewhere in Africa.