First Advisor

Jennifer Tappan

Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Closed Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in History and University Honors

Department

History

Language

English

Subjects

Copper miners -- Zambia -- Social conditions -- 20th century, Medical care -- Zambia -- History -- 20th century, Industrial relations -- Zambia -- History -- 20th century, Strikes and lockouts -- Miners -- Zambia, Copper industry and trade -- Zambia, Copper Miners' Strike (Zambia 1935), Copper Miners' Strike (Zambia 1940)

DOI

10.15760/honors.1023

Abstract

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in the conditions of labor and labor migration in central Africa by scholars such as Miles Larmer, whose work compared conditions on the Belgian and Northern Rhodesian Copperbelts to provide a new narrative for how capital-labor relations developed in the region, and Patience Mususa, whose scholarship focuses on the character of social welfare services on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt. This new literature and the earlier work from which it was inspired, while citing the 1935 and 1940 labor strikes as pivotal moments in the history of Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, does little to connect the health and labor conditions on the Copperbelt with strikers' motivation to take industrial action in '35 and '40. This paper sets out to examine the relationship between health and the mineworkers' strikes of 1935 and 1940. Influenced by James Ferguson's work, it also explores dependency as a survival strategy for miners and their families. It supports the argument that the '35 and '40 strikes were a product of miners looking to improve their living and working conditions and rejects the idea that these strikes were explicitly anti-colonialist in nature, as argued by M.R. Mwendapole, or that they were merely primitive, spontaneous strikes borne from confusion, in the case of 1935, or from a desire to emulate Europeans, such as in 1940.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

This thesis is only available to students, faculty and staff at PSU.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/35512

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