‘Solwezi Mabanga’: Ambivalent Developments on Zambia's New Mining Frontier

Abstract

As African countries recover from decades of economic decline, images of the continent in popular discourses reflect growing optimism through such tropes as ‘Africa Rising’ and ‘the African Century’. Within this narrative, Zambia has been seen as a success story of neoliberal capitalism, having managed relatively high economic growth since the early 2000s. This is largely on account of foreign investments in the country's mining sector, a process that has created new frontiers of mineral extraction, including the so-called ‘New Copperbelt’ in the Solwezi District of Northwestern Province. The resultant changes are typically understood as the capital-led development of a hitherto ‘backward’ region. I interrogate this line of reasoning through a grounded exploration of mining's materiality and its imbrications with everyday life. I argue that, given the vagaries of capitalist development and past histories of economic ‘busts’, even outwardly hopeful moments like the millennial economic boom are stalked by anxieties and apprehensions of chaos, disorder and potential ruination, thereby revealing the fundamentally ambivalent nature of experiences and expectations in Zambia's new mining towns.