Benjamin Rubbers is a professor of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Liège. He is also the Principal Investigator of an exciting new research project on the anthropology of labour, which focuses on the Zambian and Congolese copperbelts. Read here about his ERC funded research project WORKINMINING.
The micropolitics of work in the mining companies of Central Africa (WORKINMINING)
Benjamin Rubbers
Funded by a Consolidator grant from the ERC (646802), the research project ‘Reinventing paternalism. The micropolitics of work in the mining companies of Central Africa’ (WORKINMINING) is a collective ethnographic investigation into the changes that new mining investors brought to labour in Congo and Zambia. Based at the University of Liège in Belgium, it will be carried out by a team of six researchers over a period of five years (2015-2020). For more details on the project, please visit the project website www.workinmining.ulg.ac.be (it will be online by the end of February 2017).
The general aim of the Workinmining research project is to understand the work, social, and political conditions in which the copper ore that makes up cables and wires worldwide is produced in Congo and Zambia. To this end, the research takes two aspects of the copper mining sector as its starting point:
On the one hand, this sector is witnessing the entry of new actors of various sizes and origins who are competing for the control of copper resources. Studying labour in this sector requires taking this diversity into account, and being aware of the distinctive work traditions these economic actors bring with them to Africa.
On the other hand, mining investment within this sector is so capital-intensive that its amortization takes decades. In order to make their investment secure and profitable, companies have to negotiate their presence with their workers, the political authorities, and local communities. The people living in and around the mines, therefore, hold a certain degree of power over the implementation of mining projects.
Independently of the dynamics of global capitalism, the forms that labour takes in the mining sector is to be understood in the light of the diversity of the companies involved, and of the complex, mutually dependent, relationship these companies develop with people living in the area of their operations.
What is unique to the mining areas of Zambia and Congo from this point of view is that, for a century, their economy has depended almost entirely on the copper industry, and the price of this metal on the world market. Seen from these mining areas, the recent mining boom is not really new; it follows a succession of booms and busts since the introduction of colonial capitalism in the first half of the 20th century.
More fundamentally, the century-old inclusion of the mining industry in the social fabric of both copperbelts requires that particular attention be paid to the historicity of practices and discourses relating to work within the mining sector. The expectations and conflicts aroused by the arrival of new companies cannot be adequately understood independently of the policies and struggles of the past.
The project builds on the hypothesis that new mining investors in Congo and Zambia do not so much break with the labour policies of the past as give them new directions. To test this hypothesis, and analyse the changes caused by the recent mining boom, the team studies how mining companies’ management practices are negotiated by different categories of people: Francesca Pugliese and James Musonda study the everyday life of mineworkers at work, in the family, and during leisure activities; Thomas McNamara and Kristien Geenen carry out ethnographic research with trade unions and other civil society organizations; and Emma Lochery and Benjamin Rubbers, the Principal Investigator, interview human resources managers, state representatives, and subcontractors.
Through an emphasis on teamwork, project researchers work together not just to develop a comprehensive analysis of the micropolitics of work in each country, but also to make thorough comparisons between the Congolese and Zambian copperbelts – two historically related areas, where mining companies are confronted with more or less similar constraints.
This is, I believe, the first area of complementarity with the project ‘Comparing the Copperbelt’ led by Professor M. Larmer at the University of Oxford. This latter project will allow to better understand the historical interconnections, similarities, and contrasts between the two copperbelts while the Workinmining project will give insights on how these processes of (dis-)junction unfold in the present.
Closely related to this first area of complementarity is a second, more theoretical, one: the centrality of labour and mining as major concerns in the intellectual understanding of the Central African Copperbelt. Through a study on changes caused by the recent mining boom, the Workinmining project ambitions to rethink what have been long lasting issues in the anthropology and historiography of the region. The Comparing the Copperbelt’s project, by contrast, aims to address issues that have remained understudied in the scholarship about the Copperbelt and, in so doing, challenge the ways in which this part of Africa has been imagined and conceptualized.
More generally, the implementation of the two research projects at the same time creates an exciting opportunity for developing a dialogue between history and anthropology, and improving our understanding of the dynamics in and between both copperbelts in the past and present.