The Country and the City on the Copperbelt

Abstract

Themes of rurality, or country, have often provided powerful metaphors for the construction of indigenous critiques of urban, capitalist, industrial encroachments. In a variety of settings, notions of as natural, pure, authentic, or whole have provided powerful alternative moral images to be contrasted with urban realities conceived as artificial, immoral, corrupt, and anomic. Thus, Raymond Williams (1973) has explored the way in which concepts of country and city in England over the centuries have provided central tropes for conceptualizing the social and economic changes associated with capitalist industrialization. In the same spirit, John and Jean Comaroff (1987) have shown in their work on the Tshidi of South Africa how, where historical consciousness is not formulated according to the conventions of narrative realism, a set of dualistic contrasts involving notions of inside versus outside, work versus labor, and rural versus urban has provided an implicit critical commentary on the exploitative system of migrant wage labor. Part I of this article will show how constructions of in Zambia have been contrasted with urban ills in similar ways, both by localist workers with strong links to rural areas, and by more cosmopolitan urbanites during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Part II, however, will go on to show how such critiques of contrast tended to give way in the late 1970s and 1980s to a more inwardly directed critique that located the blame for urban ills in the supposed selfishness of Zambians. Part III explores some of the connections between a changing political-economic situation and these changes in styles of critical apprehension of urban ills. It argues that the shift in styles of critique is linked to changes in ideas of that have come about through political-economic shifts, as urban dwellers' life trajectories have increasingly been brought into conflict with places long imagined and idealized from a certain distance.