Slimes and Death-Dealing Dambos: Water, Industry and the Garden City on Zambia's Copperbelt**The Wellcome Trust funded some of the research on which this article is based – University Award Grant No. 056339, ‘Mining, medicine and the body in Zambia’, 1999–2002. Thanks to Timothy Mgala of the University of Zambia's Institute for Economic and Social Research for assistance with the interviews.

Abstract

From 1927 to 1930 Roan Antelope Mine in colonial Zambia experienced a high death rate, which disrupted the recruitment of both European and African miners. This mortality crisis stimulated subsequent plans for urbanisation on the Copperbelt, which emerged from interwar thinking about city planning, tropical sanitation and malaria control. Mining industrialists, medical experts and government officials evoked a vision of the ‘garden city’ to foster an image of concern for the health and welfare of their workers; and the mastery of water dominated their garden city plans for the Copperbelt towns. Malaria experts and mining engineers radically altered rivers and wetlands to reduce flooding of mine shafts and limit mosquito-breeding habitat. The result was a highly controlled medicalised and industrialised environment that expanded with the growth of the Copperbelt towns. Yet water in its material and sacred forms constantly reasserted its power, disrupting industrial and medical control. This article focuses on the event that initiated this pattern of control and disruption – the Luanshya River Snake episode, 1927–1930. The history of stories about this vengeful snake spirit can provide insights about African and European responses to the power of water on the Copperbelt.