Living for the City: Social Change and Knowledge Production in the Central African Copperbelt by Miles Larmer

Abstract

Living for the City is a sweeping history of the Central African Copperbelt across the twentieth century, with a special focus on the late colonial and early independence eras. Although the book is primarily a social history, it also offers an intellectual history, emphasizing the process of knowledge production over time. Its scope is broad, covering the lived experiences of Copperbelt residents on either side of the Zambia–Democratic Republic of Congo border in everything from nationalism to music. Each chapter offers a distinct set of arguments related to a theme of social or political life. To make these arguments, Larmer draws richly from numerous archives, more than 100 oral interviews, and earlier scholarship that is alternately treated as primary (as it contributes to intellectual history) or secondary source material. Throughout the book, Larmer contrasts the experiences of residents on either side of the border, complicating the meta-narrative of the Copperbelt as modernized, organized urban space, and contextualizing the different politics of each region around independence. This book is part of an ambitious broader “Comparing the Copperbelt” project.The book is organized thematically into nine substantive chapters, with a throughline considering how “top down” knowledge production shaped social life, though social life often contradicted official narratives. Chapter 1 offers an intellectual history of the region, assessing how colonial social scientists and their African research assistants conceptualized the likely social impact of growing urbanism caused by the company towns springing up around the copper mines. Chapter 2 re-examines the period from the end of World War I to 1975—a period typically characterized as a boom on the Copperbelt—to show that most residents in fact had precarious livelihoods. Chapter 3 discusses the segregation of the mine towns by race and class, contrasting the authoritarian paternalism of the company-run towns to the relative freedom and chaos of the informal settlements around them.Chapter 4 compares political activism and unionism in the two countries, describing the process by which Zambian unions became powerful, while those in Zaire remained toothless. Chapter 5 addresses the issue of gender on the Copperbelt, showing how official preoccupation with marriage and women’s labor manifested differently on each side of the border. Chapter 6 contrasts the nationalist impulses that grew out of each region, alongside the government’s actions to nationalize the mines after independence in both countries. Chapter 7 considers art and culture, analyzing the official preoccupation with indigenous “authenticity” alongside art scenes marked by cultural syncretism. Chapter 8 evaluates the economic decline of the Copperbelt from 1975 to 2000, showing how it led to political reform in Zambia but repression in Zaire. Finally, Chapter 9 describes the effect of a century of pollution on the Copperbelt landscape, calling into question the prosperousness of the region.This book will appeal to social scientists of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, its breadth guaranteeing many things of interest to researchers across disciplines. As Larmer notes in his conclusion, the breadth of the book necessarily means that each chapter offers a broad overview of its topic. Despite this breadth, Larmer presents an extraordinary amount of historical detail, sometimes requiring the reader to place that detail into a theoretical framework. The book is at its strongest when showcasing the voices of the Africans who contributed interviews and oral histories and when providing explicit comparison between the Copperbelt politics on both sides of the border (most notably in Chapters 4, 6, and 8). For example, Larmer illustrates how the policies of the company towns exacerbated ethnic tensions in Congo while dampening them in Zambia, thus generating different political landscapes.An important contribution of the book is the thread of intellectual history that runs throughout the chapters, revealing that the historical understanding of the Copperbelt has depended on the biases of those who collected the information. Although Larmer acknowledges that his use of interview material does not solve this problem, it highlights how lived experiences diverged from official recordkeeping. This insight and its illustration throughout the book have important implications for historians of other societies with limited or lopsided written historical records.