The locus of reproduction: women's labour in the Zambian Copperbelt, 1927–1953

Abstract

An important advance in the study of southern African labour history in the last decade has been the recognition that capital has historically sought to relieve itself of the costs of social reproduction. The argument suggests that South African mining capital, in order to reduce the cost of wages paid to its African employees thus increasing the level of surplus value it could extract sought to localise social reproduction in the rural areas. By encouraging a system of migrant labour, companies avoided responsibility both for the maintenance of workers' families at the mine during their period of employment and for the maintenance of the workers themselves at the end of their working lives. I This paper, primarily a study of the causes, structure, and implications of women's involvement in the Zambian (Northern Rhodesian) copper mining industry, questions both the conceptual and spatial dimensions accorded social reproduction in this paradigm. Social reproduction, it suggests, involves not only the generational reproduction of the working class as a whole, but also the daily reproduction of labour power, that is, the daily maintenance of the worker. The Northern Rhodesian mining companies saw it in their interest to localise this second aspect of women's reproductive labour not in the rural areas, as the standard paradigm would predict, but under company domain and on company property. Women's unpaid labour, performed in the mining compounds, reproduced labour power on a daily basis and increased its productivity in the long term more effectively and cheaply than could the companies directly. Thus, contrary to Wolpe's South African model, the ability of capital in Northern Rhodesia to extract greater surplus value depended on its success in relocating women's reproductive labour to the urban areas. Moreover, although this calculation was initially based on a short-term assessment of the potential reduction of wage costs, some elements of management came to suspect by the second