Abstract
Trade unions in Zambia and in several other developing countries have been understood to create ‘detribalising’ class consciousnesses. In contrast, we argue that Zambian understandings of unionism have developed through similar political economic processes to those that generated ‘tribes’. Values and structures that enable concepts of the good life more commonly found among Bemba speakers and Eastern Zambians have been naturalised into Zambia’s mining unions, guiding union policy and practice in a manner which limits North Western Zambians’ union participation. Utilising Lazar's (2018) understanding of unionism as kinship, we explore how Zambians of various tribes attempt to utilise unions to achieve what they see as human flourishing and social justice. We foreground that people’s understandings of the good life frequently incorporate gendered and gerontocratic hierarchies and we demonstrate that intra-national unionisms are co-created through (and influence) local cultural norms and political histories. This encourages anthropologists of trade unionism to ask what values and hierarchies are rendered invisible in other union ‘families’, and to explore intertwinements between unions and communities enabled through kinship, rather than through Civil Society Organisations.
Highlights
Trade unions in Zambia and in several other developing countries have been understood to create ‘detribalising’ class consciousnesses
Where some labour theorists, including those who write on Zambia, argue that unions should attempt to generate a detribalising class consciousness (Parpart 1987 & Werbner 2018), we show that being a tribe member and unionists are not mutually exclusive forms of kinship
We explore how connections to community are entwined with locally constructed kinship norms and hierarchies and demonstrate that unionist political action is enabled or diminished through these kinships, as much as through class consciousness or civil society organisations (CSOs) union alliances
Summary
The development of three mines in Zambia’s North West has created a ‘New Copperbelt’. Their regionalist political claims responded to, and utilised, their Kaonde, Lunda and Luvale co-workers’ frustrations at the region’s perceived underdevelopment While their engagement with chiefs and North West Zambian politicians often encouraged forms of ethnic entrepreneurship (see Kapesa et al 2015), collective action in the North West was motivated by both local and migrant miners’ inability to fulfil their personhoods as unionised workers and as family members. Zambians experience idealised ways of being and kinship obligations through notions of tribe and the obligations of being a unionist are often closely entwined with those of identifying as Bemba: tribal differences motivate labour militancy in North West Zambia, both through ethnic entrepreneurship and through workers’ attempts to enact concepts social justice embedded in their differing kin obligations: calls for the unions to perform CSR in the North Western province reflect the unions’ entwinement with Copperbelt aspirations, economies and networks, rather than signifying a politically engaged community unionism
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